Comment by lupire
2 days ago
Remember 20 years ago when Eclipse could move a function by manipulating the AST and following references to adjust imports and callers, and it it didn't lose any code?
2 days ago
Remember 20 years ago when Eclipse could move a function by manipulating the AST and following references to adjust imports and callers, and it it didn't lose any code?
I have a suite of agent tools that is just waiting on my search service for a release, it includes `srefactor` and `spatch` commands that have fuzzy semantic alignment with strong error guards, they use LSP and tree sitter to enable refactoring/patching without line numbers or anything and ensure the patch is correct.
Nice. This sounds like the right approach. As an aside, it’s crazy that a mature LSP server is not a first class requirement for language choice in 2025. I used to write mini LSP servers before working on a project starting when LSP came out a few years ago. Now that there is wider adoption, I don’t find myself reaching for this quite as often, but it’s still a really nice way to ease development on mature codebases that have grown their own design patterns.
I think it's likely that these agent-based development will inevitably add more imperative tools to their arsenal to lower cost, improve speed and accuracy.
It’s still early days for these agents. There isn’t any reason the agents won’t build or understand AST in the future to more quickly refactor.
Why do the agents need to build or understand it? Just give them tools to work with it like we would.
Everyone talking about MCP and they haven’t figured this out. Actually, JetBrains has an IDE MCP server plugin, although I haven’t tried it.