English

How AI Coding Agents Communicate: A Study of Pull Request Description Characteristics and Human Review Responses

Artificial Intelligence 2026-02-20 v1 Software Engineering

Abstract

The rapid adoption of large language models has led to the emergence of AI coding agents that autonomously create pull requests on GitHub. However, how these agents differ in their pull request description characteristics, and how human reviewers respond to them, remains underexplored. In this study, we conduct an empirical analysis of pull requests created by five AI coding agents using the AIDev dataset. We analyze agent differences in pull request description characteristics, including structural features, and examine human reviewer response in terms of review activity, response timing, sentiment, and merge outcomes. We find that AI coding agents exhibit distinct PR description styles, which are associated with differences in reviewer engagement, response time, and merge outcomes. We observe notable variation across agents in both reviewer interaction metrics and merge rates. These findings highlight the role of pull request presentation and reviewer interaction dynamics in human-AI collaborative software development.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.17084,
  title  = {How AI Coding Agents Communicate: A Study of Pull Request Description Characteristics and Human Review Responses},
  author = {Kan Watanabe and Rikuto Tsuchida and Takahiro Monno and Bin Huang and Kazuma Yamasaki and Youmei Fan and Kazumasa Shimari and Kenichi Matsumoto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.17084},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:42:28.498Z