Tuning LLM-based Code Optimization via Meta-Prompting: An Industrial Perspective

Abstract: There is a growing interest in leveraging LLMs for automated code optimization. However, industrial platforms deploying multiple LLMs face a critical challenge: prompts optimized for one LLM often fail with others, requiring expensive model-specific prompt engineering. This cross-model prompt engineering bottleneck severely limits the practical deployment of multi-LLM optimization systems in production environments. To address this, we introduce Meta-Prompted Code Optimization (MPCO), a framework that automatically generates high-quality, task-specific prompts across diverse LLMs while maintaining industrial efficiency requirements. MPCO leverages meta-prompting to dynamically synthesize context-aware optimization prompts by integrating project metadata, task requirements, and LLM-specific contexts, and it seamlessly deploys on the ARTEMIS industrial platform for automated validation and scaling. Our comprehensive evaluation on five real-world codebases with 366 hours of runtime benchmarking demonstrates MPCO's effectiveness: it achieves overall performance improvements up to 19.06% with the best statistical rank across all systems compared to baseline methods. Analysis shows that 96% of the top-performing optimizations stem from meaningful edits. Through systematic ablation studies and meta-prompter sensitivity analysis, we identify that comprehensive context integration is essential for effective meta-prompting, and that all three major LLMs can serve effectively as meta-prompters, providing actionable insights for industrial practitioners.