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Related papers: Are Coding Agents Generating Over-Mocked Tests? An…

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AI coding assistants have become prolific in recent years. Through a longitudinal mixed-methods investigation, we examined how professional software engineers perceive the effects of AI coding assistants in regard to task focus, developer…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Annie Vella , Kelly Blincoe

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

Developing test code may be a time-consuming task that usually requires much effort and cost, especially when it is done manually. Besides, during this process, developers and testers are likely to adopt bad design choices, which may lead…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-03-13 Nildo Silva Junior , Larissa Rocha , Luana Almeida Martins , Ivan Machado

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for automated unit test generation. This has motivated us to investigate whether developer-defined test doubles (commonly referred to as mocks) available in existing test…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Jamie Lee , Flynn Teh , Hengcheng Zhu , Mengzhen Li , Mattia Fazzini , Valerio Terragni

Agent tools are becoming a core interface through which LLM agents access external data, services, and execution environments. As these tools are distributed through public marketplaces, raw tool counts may substantially overstate ecosystem…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Taein Kim , David Jiang , Yuepeng Hu , Yuqi Jia , Neil Gong

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) as coding agents promises to accelerate software development, but their impact on generated code reproducibility remains largely unexplored. This paper presents an empirical study investigating…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Bhanu Prakash Vangala , Ali Adibifar , Ashish Gehani , Tanu Malik

[Context] In software engineering research, emphasis is given to sound evaluations of new approaches. While industry surveys or industrial case studies are preferred to evaluate industrial applicability, controlled experiments with student…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-08-17 Marian Daun , Carolin Hübscher , Thorsten Weyer

Large language model (LLM) coding agents can generate working code, but their solutions often accumulate complexity, duplication, and architectural debt. Human developers address such issues through refactoring: behavior-preserving program…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Alex Thillen , Niels Mündler , Veselin Raychev , Martin Vechev

AI coding agents increasingly act directly within software environments, yet existing analyses of their failures rely on benchmark trajectories that miss how developers actually experience misalignment. We present an observational study of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Ningzhi Tang , Chaoran Chen , Gelei Xu , Yiyu Shi , Yu Huang , Collin McMillan , Tao Dong , Toby Jia-Jun Li

The increasing adoption of AI coding agents has increased the number of agent-generated pull requests (PRs) merged with little or no human intervention. Although such PRs promise productivity gains, their post-merge code quality remains…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Shamse Tasnim Cynthia , Al Muttakin , Banani Roy

Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…

General Economics · Economics 2025-09-26 Bruno Ferman , Lucas Finamor

Large Language Models are expanding beyond being a tool humans use and into independent agents that can observe an environment, reason about solutions to problems, make changes that impact those environments, and understand how their…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Tailia Malloy , Tegawende F. Bissyande

Agentic AI and Multi-Agent Systems are poised to dominate industry and society imminently. Powered by goal-driven autonomy, they represent a powerful form of generative AI, marking a transition from reactive content generation into…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Brian Bowers , Smita Khapre , Jugal Kalita

In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Andre Oliveira , Vania Neves , Alexandre Plastino , Ana Carla Bibiano , Alessandro Garcia , Leonardo Murta

LLM-generated code is widely used, and the share of committed code produced by LLMs is expected to increase. However, we are not at a point where LLMs can be effective contributors to production code. We present an approach that exposes the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Chun Jie Chong , Muyeed Ahmed , Zhihao , Yao , Iulian Neamtiu

Enabling fully automated testing of mobile applications has recently become an important topic of study for both researchers and practitioners. A plethora of tools and approaches have been proposed to aid mobile developers both by…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-01-22 Mario Linares Vasquez , Carlos Bernal-Cardenas , Kevin Moran , Denys Poshyvanyk

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as coding assistants, capable of generating source code from natural language prompts. With the increasing adoption of LLMs in software development, academic research and industry based projects are…

AI coding agents are now submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, acting not just as assistants but as autonomous contributors. As these agentic contributions are rapidly increasing across real repositories, little is known…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Ramtin Ehsani , Sakshi Pathak , Shriya Rawal , Abdullah Al Mujahid , Mia Mohammad Imran , Preetha Chatterjee

LLM-based coding agents are increasingly used to generate code, tests, and documentation. Still, their outputs can be plausible yet misaligned with developer intent and provide limited evidence for review in evolving projects. This limits…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ragib Shahariar Ayon