{"ID":5438667,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-01T01:17:58.482524686Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-03T06:27:30.740454161Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31206","arxiv_id":"2606.31206","title":"FeatX: Editing Software by Editing Features for Repository-Level Code Evolution","abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for software evolution, yet most interaction paradigms remain code-centric and require manual context management and prompt iteration. We present FeatX, a feature-oriented tool for editing software by editing features. Given an existing repository, FeatX extracts a hierarchical epic-feature structure with explicit feature-to-code mappings, then invokes a three-stage Evolution Agent to translate feature edits into code patches. The workflow is exposed through four coordinated panels. Across a controlled user study and replay experiments on 38 real-world feature-editing commits, FeatX significantly reduces cognitive load and improves usability compared with vanilla ChatGPT. It also achieves a 42.6\\% relative improvement in function-level modification localization F1 over strong LLM baselines, at substantially lower cost (\\$0.07 in total). The tool and collected dataset are available at https://github.com/a496263365/FeatX/tree/demo, with a demonstration video at https://youtu.be/OZqKZ4Ii-yM.","short_abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for software evolution, yet most interaction paradigms remain code-centric and require manual context management and prompt iteration. We present FeatX, a feature-oriented tool for editing software by editing features. Given an existing repository, FeatX extracts a hie...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31206","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.31206v1","authors":"[\"Xutian Li\",\"Yifeng Zhu\",\"Xianlin Zhao\",\"Yanzhen Zou\",\"Lu Zhang\",\"Bing Xie\"]","published":"2026-06-30T06:38:56Z","proceeding":"cs.SE","tasks":"[\"cs.SE\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":613774,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-01T01:17:58.482524686Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-01T01:17:58.482524686Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":5438667,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31206","paper_title":"FeatX: Editing Software by Editing Features for Repository-Level Code Evolution","repo_url":"https://github.com/a496263365/FeatX","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}