The Code of Theseus: Can Agents Rebuild Software from Recovered Design Documents?

Abstract

LLM agents increasingly design a system before implementing it, yet the data to train and evaluate them centres on implementation and testing: requirements and design artefacts are often missing, outdated or private. Source code, in contrast, is abundant. Prior work recovers architecture documentation by feeding LLMs the source code or letting agents explore it, which saturates the context, does not scale to many repositories, and yields a single artefact rather than aligned ones. We present a framework that recovers aligned stakeholder intent, requirements and architecture from a compact repository representation, a static dependency graph and key contextual files, and release the artefacts of 10,764 Java, Python, C/C++ and C# repositories as a dataset. An LLM judge rates the artefacts of three generators as clear and internally consistent, but less reliably correct and at the right level of abstraction. To test whether the artefacts carry the design, we pose a software Ship of Theseus: a coding agent rebuilds 29 Commit0 libraries from the intent alone or with the recovered requirements and architecture, given only an interface contract and part of the tests. The artefacts do not significantly change the held-out pass rate (33.7% vs. 35.8%), but bring the rebuilt module structure significantly closer to the original (module F1 from 0.54 to 0.63), with either generator and even with concise artefacts. Recovered artefacts thus convey design that tests do not capture, offering a scalable source of design-level data for agents that design before they implement, and the round trip measures this without human references.