Agents Refactor 300K Lines in Three Weeks, and Practitioners Ask What It Proves
InfoQ, Wednesday, September 30th, 2026
CodeScene used coding agents to refactor a 300,000-line C codebase in three weeks for about $4,000 in tokens.
InfoQ's Steef-Jan Wiggers reports on a CodeScene case study in which coding agents refactored the 300,000-line C decompilation of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike in three weeks for about $4,000 in tokens, producing 2,903 commits across 726 files and raising the Code Health score from 5.6 to 10.0.
Two mechanisms made it work: the CodeHealth MCP Server as a deterministic quality signal, and a replay-trace harness that verified behavior frame by frame.
The agents also built their own playbook of 22 refactoring recipes, while practitioners debate how far the result generalizes.