Automatically Refining Coding Rules for AI Coding Agents

The performance of AI coding agents is highly dependent on their underlying coding rules. However, existing coding rules are typically hand-crafted, making the process labor-intensive and often suboptimal. In this work, we propose RuleRefine, a framework for automatic coding rule refinement. RuleRefine maintains a pool of candidate coding rules and iteratively improves them. In each iteration, it employs an LLM-powered mutator module to generate variants from existing candidates, and then uses a judge module to evaluate these variants and update the pool with the best-performing ones. Extensive evaluations across two coding-agent frameworks, four backbone LLMs, and three benchmarks demonstrate that RuleRefine outperforms both manual engineering and existing prompt optimization baselines in terms of functional correctness of the generated code, code length, and/or generation cost (e.g., tokens used).