Copy-paste-modify is a widespread and pragmatic practice in software development, where developers adapt reused code snippets, sourced from platforms such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, or LLM outputs, into their local codebase. A critical yet underexplored aspect of this adaptation is code wiring: the context-aware process of substituting unresolved variables in pasted code with suitable variables or expressions from the surrounding context. Existing solutions either rely on heuristic rules or historical templates, often failing to effectively utilize contextual information, despite studies showing that over half of adaptation cases are context-dependent. In this paper, we introduce WIRL, an LLM-based agent for code wiring framed as a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) infilling task. WIRL combines an LLM, a customized toolkit, and an orchestration module to identify unresolved variables, retrieve context, and perform context-aware substitutions. To balance efficiency and autonomy, the agent adopts a mixed strategy: deterministic rule-based steps for common patterns, and a state-machine-guided decision process for intelligent exploration. We evaluate WIRL on a carefully curated, high-quality dataset consisting of real-world code adaptation scenarios. Our approach achieves an exact match precision of 91.7% and a recall of 90.0%, outperforming advanced LLMs by 22.6 and 13.7 percentage points in precision and recall, respectively, and surpassing IntelliJ IDEA by 54.3 and 49.9 percentage points. These results underscore its practical utility, particularly in contexts with complex variable dependencies or multiple unresolved variables. We believe WIRL paves the way for more intelligent and context-aware developer assistance in modern IDEs.

Extract local variable is one of the most popular refactorings. It is frequently employed to replace occurrences of a complex expression with simple accesses to a newly introduced variable that is initialized by the original complex expression. Consequently, most IDEs and refactoring tools provide automated support for this refactoring, e.g., to suggest names for the newly extracted variables. However, we find approximately 70% of the names recommended by these IDEs are different from what developers manually constructed, adding additional renaming burdens to developers and providing limited assistance. In this article, we introduce VarNamer , an automated approach designed to recommend variable names for extract local variable refactorings. Through a large-scale empirical study, we identify key contexts, such as variable initializations and homogeneous variables (variables whose initializations are identical to that of the newly extracted variable), that are useful for composing variable names. Leveraging these insights, we developed a set of heuristic rules through program static analysis techniques, e.g., lexical analysis, syntax analysis, control flow analysis, and data flow analysis, and employ data mining techniques, i.e., FP-growth algorithm, to recommend variable names effectively. Notably, some of our heuristic rules have been successfully integrated into Eclipse , where they are now distributed with the latest releases of the IDE. Evaluation of VarNamer on a dataset of 27,158 real-world extract local variable refactorings in Java applications demonstrates its superiority over state-of-the-art IDEs. Specifically, VarNamer significantly increases the chance of exact match by 52.6% compared to Eclipse and 40.7% compared to IntelliJ IDEA . We also evaluated the proposed approach with real-world extract local variable refactorings conducted in C \(++\) projects, and the results suggest that the approach can achieve comparable performance on programming languages besides Java. It may suggest the generalizability of VarNamer . Finally, we designed and conducted a user study to investigate the impact of VarNamer on developers’ productivity. The results of the user study suggest that our approach can speed up the refactoring by 27.8% and reduce 49.3% edits on the recommended variable names.

Methods are basic elements for functional organization in software applications. A high-quality method name should clearly express its function, and help developers understand its usages quickly without reading through the lengthy and complex method body. However, in some cases, method names could be inconsistent with their functional implementations. The inconsistency in turn may result in inaccurate interpretation of methods, and even buggy method invocations. To this end, in this paper, we propose a deep learning-based approach, called NameChecker, to detecting the inconsistency between method names and their corresponding method bodies. NameChecker extracts lexical and structural features of source code by static code analysis. Based on the extracted features, NameChecker employs deep learning techniques (i.e., LSTM, and Attention mechanism) to predict whether the given method name is consistent with its implementation. Different from other deep learning based approaches to inconsistency detection, NameChecker avoids the generation (recommendation) of method names. Empirical studies suggested that generated method names are often incorrect, and thus avoiding method name generation may significantly improve the accuracy of NameChecker. We evaluate NameChecker on open-source applications, and our evaluation results suggest that NameChecker improves the state of the art by increasing the F1-score from 66.7% to 73.4%.