AutoCodeRover: Autonomous Program Improvement

Researchers have made significant progress in automating the software development process in the past decades. Automated techniques for issue summarization, bug reproduction, fault localization, and program repair have been built to ease the workload of developers. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted the development process, where developers can use LLM-based programming assistants to achieve automated coding. Nevertheless software engineering involves the process of program improvement apart from coding, specifically to enable software maintenance (e.g. program repair to fix bugs) and software evolution (e.g. feature additions). In this paper, we propose an automated approach for solving Github issues to autonomously achieve program improvement. In our approach called AutoCodeRover, LLMs are combined with sophisticated code search capabilities, ultimately leading to a program modification or patch. In contrast to recent LLM agent approaches from AI researchers and practitioners, our outlook is more software engineering oriented. We work on a program representation (abstract syntax tree) as opposed to viewing a software project as a mere collection of files. Our code search exploits the program structure in the form of classes/methods to enhance LLM's understanding of the issue's root cause, and effectively retrieve a context via iterative search. The use of spectrum based fault localization using tests, further sharpens the context. Experiments on the recently proposed SWE-bench-lite which consists of 300 real-life Github issues involving bug fixing and feature additions show increased efficacy (resolving more than 20% on SWE-bench-lite), as compared to recent efforts from the AI community. We posit that our workflow enables autonomous software engineering, where, in future, auto-generated code from LLMs can be autonomously improved.