mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

On Autopilot? An Empirical Study of Human-AI Teaming and Review Practices in Open Source

arXiv 2601.13754 ↗First posted 20 Jan 2026cs.SEcited by 4

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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.

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

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  1. 2026Investigating Autonomous Agent Contributions in the Wild: Activity Patterns and Code Change over Time
  2. 2026Humans Integrate, Agents Fix: How Agent-Authored Pull Requests Are Referenced in Practice
  3. 2025On the Use of Agentic Coding: An Empirical Study of Pull Requests on GitHub
  4. 2026A Task-Level Evaluation of AI Agents in Open-Source Projects
  5. 2026From Conversation to Contribution: Characterizing Coding Agent in Open-Source Software
  6. 2026How AI Coding Agents Modify Code: A Large-Scale Study of GitHub Pull Requests
  7. 2026Safer Builders, Risky Maintainers: A Comparative Study of Breaking Changes in Human vs Agentic PRs
  8. 2026Let's Make Every Pull Request Meaningful: An Empirical Analysis of Developer and Agentic Pull Requests