AstraAI: LLMs, Retrieval, and AST-Guided Assistance for HPC Codebases

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 28 Mar 2026] AstraAI: LLMs, Retrieval, and AST-Guided Assistance for HPC Codebases Mahesh Natarajan, Xiaoye Li, Weiqun Zhang We present AstraAI, a command-line interface (CLI) coding framework for high-performance computing (HPC) software development. AstraAI operates directly within a Linux terminal and integrates large language models (LLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)-based structural analysis to enable context-aware code generation for complex scientific codebases. The central idea is to construct a high-fidelity prompt that is passed to the LLM for inference. This prompt augments the user request with relevant code snippets retrieved from the underlying framework codebase via RAG and structural context extracted from AST analysis, providing the model with precise information about relevant functions, data structures, and overall code organization. The framework is designed to perform scoped modifications to source code while preserving structural consistency with the surrounding code. AstraAI supports both locally hosted models from Hugging Face and API-based frontier models accessible via the American Science Cloud, enabling flexible deployment across HPC environments. The system generates code that aligns with existing project structures and programming patterns. We demonstrate AstraAI on representative HPC code generation tasks within AMReX, a DOE-supported HPC software infrastructure for exascale applications. Comments: 10 pages, 5 figures Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Software Engineering (cs.SE) Cite as: arXiv:2603.27423 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.27423v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.27423 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Mahesh Natarajan [view email] [v1] Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:49:05 UTC (491 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.SE References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)