# DevBots can co-design APIs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05733 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05733/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01431/) (2023)
- [Chip-Chat: Challenges and Opportunities in Conversational Hardware Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13243/) (2023)
- [Towards Human-Bot Collaborative Software Architecting with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14600/) (2023)
- [Detecting and Characterizing Bots that Commit Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03172/) (2020)
- [A ground-truth dataset and classification model for detecting bots in GitHub issue and PR comments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03303/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Bots in Software Development -- Characteristics and Challenges from a Practitioner's Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13969/) (2020)
- [Bots Don't Mind Waiting, Do They? Comparing the Interaction With Automatically and Manually Created Pull Requests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03591/) (2021)
- [Artificial Intelligence Impact On The Labour Force -- Searching For The Analytical Skills Of The Future Software Engineers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13229/) (2023)
- [Conversational DevBots for Secure Programming: An Empirical Study on SKF Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06200/) (2022)
- [Challenges and guidelines on designing test cases for test bots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10143/) (2020)
- [Evaluating a bot detection model on git commit messages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11779/) (2021)
- [Can a Chatbot Support Exploratory Software Testing? Preliminary Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05807/) (2023)
- [Designing Adaptive Developer-Chatbot Interactions: Context Integration, Experimental Studies, and Levels of Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00886/) (2023)
- [BotHawk: An Approach for Bots Detection in Open Source Software Projects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13386/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

DevBots are automated tools that perform various tasks in order to support software development. They are a growing trend and have been used in repositories to automate repetitive tasks, as code generators, and as collaborators in eliciting requirements and defining architectures. In this study, we analyzed 24 articles to investigate the state of the art of using DevBots in software development, trying to understand their characteristics, identify use cases, learn the relationship between DevBots and conversational software development, and discuss how prompt engineering can enable collaboration between human developers and bots. Additionally, we identified a gap to address by applying prompt engineering to collaborative API design between human designers and DevBots and proposed an experiment to assess what approach, between using Retrieval Augmented Generation or not, is more suitable. Our conclusion is that DevBots can collaborate with human API designers, but the two approaches have advantages and disadvantages.