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Related papers: How AI Coding Agents Modify Code: A Large-Scale St…

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When AI coding agents open branches and submit pull requests (PRs), two questions co-determine oversight design: who starts the work (operational agency) and who authorizes its completion (merge governance). We characterize tools along a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Young Jo , Chung , Safwat Hassan

Software logging is essential for maintaining and debugging complex systems, yet it remains unclear how AI coding agents handle this non-functional requirement. While prior work characterizes human logging practices, the behaviors of AI…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Youssef Esseddiq Ouatiti , Mohammed Sayagh , Hao Li , Ahmed E. Hassan

Fine-tuning large language models for code editing has typically relied on mining commits and pull requests. The working hypothesis has been that commit messages describe human intent in natural language, and patches to code describe the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Yangtian Zi , Zixuan Wu , Aleksander Boruch-Gruszecki , Jonathan Bell , Arjun Guha

Agent-based coding tools have transformed software development practices. Unlike prompt-based approaches that require developers to manually integrate generated code, these agent-based tools autonomously interact with repositories to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Suzuka Yoshimoto , Shun Fujita , Kosei Horikawa , Daniel Feitosa , Yutaro Kashiwa , Hajimu Iida

AI agents are increasingly used in software development, yet their interaction with CI/CD configurations is not well studied. We analyze 8,031 agentic pull requests (PRs) from 1,605 GitHub repositories where AI agents touch YAML…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Taher A. Ghaleb

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents are advancing quickly, with the increasing leveraging of LLM Agents to assist in development tasks such as code generation. While LLM Agents accelerate code generation, studies indicate they may introduce…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Haoming Huang , Pongchai Jaisri , Shota Shimizu , Lingfeng Chen , Sota Nakashima , Gema Rodríguez-Pérez

The rapid adoption of AI-powered coding assistants is transforming software development practices, yet systematic comparisons of their effectiveness across different task types and over time remain limited. This paper presents an empirical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Giovanni Pinna , Jingzhi Gong , David Williams , Federica Sarro

In the first half of 2025, coding agents have emerged as a category of development tools that have very quickly transitioned to the practice. Unlike ''traditional'' code completion LLMs such as Copilot, agents like Cursor, Claude Code, or…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Romain Robbes , Théo Matricon , Thomas Degueule , Andre Hora , Stefano Zacchiroli

Large language model (LLM) based coding agents increasingly act as autonomous contributors that generate and merge pull requests, yet their real-world effects on software projects are unclear-especially compared with widely adopted…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Shyam Agarwal , Hao He , Bogdan Vasilescu

Pull Requests (PRs) are central to collaborative coding, summarizing code changes for reviewers. However, many PR descriptions are incomplete, uninformative, or have out-of-context content, compromising developer workflows and hindering…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kutay Tire , Berk Çakar , Eray Tüzün

Despite the operational importance of hot fixes, large-scale evidence on how they reshape routine maintenance workflows, particularly in the era of autonomous coding agents, remains limited. We analyse hot fixes present in over 61,000…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Carol Hanna , Karine Even-Mendoza , W. B. Langdon , Mar Zamorano López , Justyna Petke , Federica Sarro

AI-based code review tools automatically review and comment on pull requests to improve code quality. Despite their growing presence, little is known about their actual impact. We present a large-scale empirical study of 16 popular AI-based…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Kexin Sun , Hongyu Kuang , Sebastian Baltes , Xin Zhou , He Zhang , Xiaoxing Ma , Guoping Rong , Dong Shao , Christoph Treude

The rapid adoption of AI coding agents is fundamentally shifting software developers' roles from code authors to code reviewers. While developers spend a significant portion of their time reading and comprehending code, the linguistic…

Pull Requests (PRs) are a mechanism on modern collaborative coding platforms, such as GitHub. PRs allow developers to tell others that their code changes are available for merging into another branch in a repository. A PR needs to be…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Ting Zhang , Ivana Clairine Irsan , Ferdian Thung , DongGyun Han , David Lo , Lingxiao Jiang

The integration of AI agents as coding assistants into software development has raised questions about the long-term viability of AI agent-generated code. A prevailing hypothesis within the software engineering community suggests this code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Musfiqur Rahman , Emad Shihab

Agentic Coding, powered by autonomous agents such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor, enables developers to generate code, tests, and pull requests from natural language instructions alone. While this accelerates implementation, it produces…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Kan Watanabe , Tatsuya Shirai , Yutaro Kashiwa , Hajimu Iida

Pull-based development has enabled numerous volunteers to contribute to open-source projects with fewer barriers. Nevertheless, a considerable amount of pull requests (PRs) with valid contributions are abandoned by their contributors,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-23 SayedHassan Khatoonabadi , Diego Elias Costa , Rabe Abdalkareem , Emad Shihab

Developers now have access to a growing array of increasingly autonomous AI tools for software development. While many studies examine copilots that provide chat assistance or code completions, evaluations of coding agents -- which can…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Valerie Chen , Ameet Talwalkar , Robert Brennan , Graham Neubig

In the pull-based development model, code contributions are submitted as pull requests (PRs) to undergo reviews and approval by other developers with the goal of being merged into the code base. A PR can be supported by a description, whose…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Shirin Pirouzkhah , Pavlína Wurzel Gonçalves , Alberto Bacchelli

Coding agents have received significant adoption in software development recently. Unlike traditional LLM-based code completion tools, coding agents work with autonomy (e.g., invoking external tools) and leave visible traces in software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Andre Hora , Romain Robbes