On Autopilot? An Empirical Study of Human-AI Teaming and Review Practices in Open Source
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
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.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.
Builds on
No reference list yet.
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026Collaborator or Assistant? How AI Coding Agents Partition Work Across Pull Request Lifecyclescited by 2
- 2026Generative Models Erode Human Temporal Learning Through Market Selectioncited by 0
- 2026Augmentation with Dilution: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Human Contributor Ecosystems After AI Coding Agent Adoptioncited by 0
- 2026How Do AI Coding Agents Contribute to Software Development? an Empirical Study of Agentic Pull Requestscited by 0
- 2026How Do AI Coding Agents Contribute to Software Development? an Empirical Study of Agentic Pull Requests23 Jul 2026
- 2026Augmentation with Dilution: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Human Contributor Ecosystems After AI Coding Agent Adoption24 Jun 2026
- 2026Generative Models Erode Human Temporal Learning Through Market Selection4 Jun 2026
- 2026Collaborator or Assistant? How AI Coding Agents Partition Work Across Pull Request Lifecycles8 May 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Investigating Autonomous Agent Contributions in the Wild: Activity Patterns and Code Change over Time
- 2026Humans Integrate, Agents Fix: How Agent-Authored Pull Requests Are Referenced in Practice
- 2025On the Use of Agentic Coding: An Empirical Study of Pull Requests on GitHub
- 2026A Task-Level Evaluation of AI Agents in Open-Source Projects
- 2026From Conversation to Contribution: Characterizing Coding Agent in Open-Source Software
- 2026How AI Coding Agents Modify Code: A Large-Scale Study of GitHub Pull Requests
- 2026Safer Builders, Risky Maintainers: A Comparative Study of Breaking Changes in Human vs Agentic PRs
- 2026Let's Make Every Pull Request Meaningful: An Empirical Analysis of Developer and Agentic Pull Requests