Comment by eterm

I completely agree. Likewise I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't done it themselves for Roslyn and Copilot. Roslyn analyzers are so incredibly powerful, and it's being ignored.

An explainer for others:

Not only can analyzers act as basic linters, but transformations are built right in to them. Every time claude does search-and-replace to add a parameter I want to cry a little, this has been a solved science.

Agents + Roslyn would be productive like little else. Imagine an agent as an orchestrator but manipulation through commands to an API that maintains guard rails and compilability.

Claude is already capable of writing roslyn analyzers, and roslyn has an API for implementing code transformations ( so called "quick fixes" ), so they already are out there in library form.

It's hard to describe them to anyone who hasn't used a similarly powerful system, but essentially it enables transforms that go way beyond simple find/replace. You get accurate transformations that can be quite complex and deep reworks to the code itself.

A simple example would be transforming a foreach loop into a for loop, or transforming and optimizing linq statements.

And yet we find these tools unused with agentic find/replace doing the heavy lifting instead.

Whichever AI company solves LSP and compiler based deep refactoring will see their utility shoot through the roof for working with large codebases.