Runnable Commit Untangling for Coding Agents

Key points

• Coding agents produce large, tangled patches that mix multiple development purposes, making the code hard to review and maintain.1
• To address these gaps, this paper makes two novel contributions: (1) RucTangle, the first agentic method that untangles commits while keeping the code runnable after each commit; and (2) TangleEval, the first evaluation framework that quantifies how untangled, manageable commit histories help coding agents repair bugs.1
• We compare RucTangle against four untangling methods on 131 agent-generated patches.1
• Our findings demonstrate the value of adopting established software engineering practices in the era of coding agents, which broaden the future research agenda: how can agents actively use software history to make better development decisions?1

Sources (1)

• [1]Runnable Commit Untangling for Coding Agents
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 8, 09:42 AM

  Commit untangling offers the promise of organizing such large patches into untangled, manageable commits.

  Coding agents produce large, tangled patches that mix multiple development purposes, making the code hard to review and maintain.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.