English

On Autopilot? An Empirical Study of Human-AI Teaming and Review Practices in Open Source

Software Engineering 2026-01-21 v1

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly automate software engineering tasks. While recent studies highlight the accelerated adoption of ``AI as a teammate'' in Open Source Software (OSS), developer interaction patterns remain under-explored. In this work, we investigated project-level guidelines and developers' interactions with AI-assisted pull requests (PRs) by expanding the AIDev dataset to include finer-grained contributor code ownership and a comparative baseline of human-created PRs. We found that over 67.5\% of AI-co-authored PRs originate from contributors without prior code ownership. Despite this, the majority of repositories lack guidelines for AI-coding agent usage. Notably, we observed a distinct interaction pattern: AI-co-authored PRs are merged significantly faster with minimal feedback. In contrast to human-created PRs where non-owner developers receive the most feedback, AI-co-authored PRs from non-owners receive the least, with approximately 80\% merged without any explicit review. Finally, we discuss implications for developers and researchers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.13754,
  title  = {On Autopilot? An Empirical Study of Human-AI Teaming and Review Practices in Open Source},
  author = {Haoyu Gao and Peerachai Banyongrakkul and Hao Guan and Mansooreh Zahedi and Christoph Treude},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.13754},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

accepted as MSR short paper