FreshBrew: A Benchmark for Evaluating AI Agents on Java Code Migration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: May, Victor, Misra, Diganta, Luo, Yanqi, Sridhar, Anjali, Gehring, Justine, Junior, Silvio Soares Ribeiro
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author May, Victor
Misra, Diganta
Luo, Yanqi
Sridhar, Anjali
Gehring, Justine
Junior, Silvio Soares Ribeiro
author_facet May, Victor
Misra, Diganta
Luo, Yanqi
Sridhar, Anjali
Gehring, Justine
Junior, Silvio Soares Ribeiro
contents AI coding assistants are rapidly becoming integral to modern software development. A key challenge in this space is the continual need to migrate and modernize codebases in response to evolving software ecosystems. Traditionally, such migrations have relied on rule-based systems and human intervention. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs), AI-driven agentic frameworks offer a promising alternative-but their effectiveness has not been systematically evaluated. In this paper, we introduce FreshBrew, a novel benchmark for evaluating AI agents on project-level Java migrations, with a specific focus on measuring an agent's ability to preserve program semantics and avoid reward hacking, which we argue requires projects with high test coverage for a rigorous and reliable evaluation. We benchmark several state-of-the-art LLMs, and compare their performance against established rule-based tools. Our evaluation of AI agents on this benchmark of 228 repositories shows that the top-performing model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, can successfully migrate 52.3 percent of projects to JDK 17. Our empirical analysis reveals novel insights into the critical strengths and limitations of current agentic approaches, offering actionable insights into their real-world applicability. Our empirical study reveals failure modes of current AI agents in realistic Java modernization tasks, providing a foundation for evaluating trustworthy code-migration systems. By releasing FreshBrew, we aim to facilitate rigorous, reproducible evaluation and catalyze progress in AI-driven codebase modernization.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle FreshBrew: A Benchmark for Evaluating AI Agents on Java Code Migration
May, Victor
Misra, Diganta
Luo, Yanqi
Sridhar, Anjali
Gehring, Justine
Junior, Silvio Soares Ribeiro
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
AI coding assistants are rapidly becoming integral to modern software development. A key challenge in this space is the continual need to migrate and modernize codebases in response to evolving software ecosystems. Traditionally, such migrations have relied on rule-based systems and human intervention. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs), AI-driven agentic frameworks offer a promising alternative-but their effectiveness has not been systematically evaluated. In this paper, we introduce FreshBrew, a novel benchmark for evaluating AI agents on project-level Java migrations, with a specific focus on measuring an agent's ability to preserve program semantics and avoid reward hacking, which we argue requires projects with high test coverage for a rigorous and reliable evaluation. We benchmark several state-of-the-art LLMs, and compare their performance against established rule-based tools. Our evaluation of AI agents on this benchmark of 228 repositories shows that the top-performing model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, can successfully migrate 52.3 percent of projects to JDK 17. Our empirical analysis reveals novel insights into the critical strengths and limitations of current agentic approaches, offering actionable insights into their real-world applicability. Our empirical study reveals failure modes of current AI agents in realistic Java modernization tasks, providing a foundation for evaluating trustworthy code-migration systems. By releasing FreshBrew, we aim to facilitate rigorous, reproducible evaluation and catalyze progress in AI-driven codebase modernization.
title FreshBrew: A Benchmark for Evaluating AI Agents on Java Code Migration
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04852