In industrial and open-source software engineering tasks, developers often perform project-wise code editing tasks, including feature enhancement, refactoring, and bug fixing, where the leading AI models are expected to support the productivity. Hence, researchers and practitioners have proposed and adopted many LLM-based solutions to facilitate their real-world development. However, they largely suffer from the balance among predicting scope, accuracy, and efficiency. For example, solutions like Cursor achieve high accuracy only in a local editing scope while its performance drops on cross-file edits. In contrast, solutions like CoEdPilot exhibit efficiency limitations when used to predict project-wise edits.In this work, we propose TRACE (Tool-integrated RecommendAtion for Code Editing), a novel subsequent code editing solution to push the boundary of scope, accuracy, and efficiency. Our rationale lies in that code edits are triggered for either semantic or syntactic reasons. Therefore, TRACE predicts subsequent edits by interleaving neural-based induction for semantic edit prediction and tool-based deduction for syntactic edit prediction. The tools can be any IDE facilities, such as refactoring tools (e.g., rename) or linting tools (e.g., use-def), providing decent performance of deducing edit-location and edit-generation. Technically, we address the challenge of (1) when to interleave between neural-based and tool-based prediction and (2) how to further improve the performance of neural-based prediction. As for the former, we learn a neural model to detect when to invoke IDE editing tools. As for the latter, we propose a novel and fine-grained editing representation to further boost the performance of neural editing models.Our extensive experiments show that, in comparison to the state-of-the-arts such as CoEdPilot, GrACE, and CCT5, TRACE significantly improves the performance of edit location (by 43.76%) and edit generation (by 11.16%). Our simulation experiment on an interactive editing setting shows that TRACE achieves an acceptance rate 6.15% higher than Cursor. Moreover, our user study consists of 24 participants on Cursor, CoEdPilot, and TRACE, on three code editing tasks. The results show that the experimental group with TRACE achieves leading performance on cross-file global edits. In addition, we observe concerning user behaviours on how participants deal with false predictions by the tools, shedding light on the design of future code-editing tools.

Recent years have seen the development of LLM-based code generation. Compared to generating code in a software project, incremental code edits are empirically observed to be more frequent. The emerging code editing approaches usually formulate the problem as generating an edit based on known relevant prior edits and context. However, practical code edits can be more complicated. First, an editing session can include multiple (ir)relevant edits to the code under edit. Second, the inference of the subsequent edits is non-trivial as the scope of its ripple effect can be the whole project. In this work, we propose CoEdPilot, an LLM-driven solution to recommend code edits by discriminating the relevant edits, exploring their interactive natures, and estimating its ripple effect in the project. Specifically, CoEdPilot orchestrates multiple neural transformers to identify what and how to edit in the project regarding both edit location and edit content. When a user accomplishes an edit with an optional editing description, an Subsequent Edit Analysis first reports the most relevant files in the project with what types of edits (e.g., keep, insert, and replace) can happen for each line of their code. Next, an Edit-content Generator generates concrete edit options for the lines of code, regarding its relevant prior changes reported by an Edit-dependency Analyzer. Last, both the Subsequent Edit Analysis and the Edit-content Generator capture relevant prior edits as feedback to readjust their recommendations. We train our models by collecting over 180K commits from 471 open-source projects in 5 programming languages. Our extensive experiments show that (1) CoEdPilot can well predict the edits (i.e., predicting edit location with accuracy of 70.8%-85.3%, and the edit content with exact match rate of 41.8% and BLEU4 score of 60.7); (2) CoEdPilot can well boost existing edit generators such as GRACE and CCT5 on exact match rate by 8.57% points and BLEU4 score by 18.08. Last, our user study on 18 participants with 3 editing tasks (1) shows that CoEdPilot can be effective in assisting users to edit code in comparison with Copilot, and (2) sheds light on the future improvement of the tool design. The video demonstration of our tool is available at https://sites.google.com/view/coedpilot/home.