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

Victor May, Diganta Misra, Yanqi Luo, Anjali Sridhar, Justine Gehring, Silvio Soares Ribeiro Junior

Keywords: Software Modernization, Large Language Model Agents, Code Generation, Benchmark, Java

TL;DR: This paper presents a benchmark for assessing AI agents on project-level Java codebase migrations, emphasizing semantic preservation and resistance to reward hacking.

Abstract: 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 (https://github.com/mrcabbage972/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\% 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.

Submission Number: 35