mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SWE-chat: Coding Agent Interactions From Real Users in the Wild

arXiv 2604.20779 ↗First posted 22 Apr 2026cs.AI cs.CY cs.SEcited by 36

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

AI coding agents are being adopted at scale, yet we lack empirical evidence on how people actually use them and how much of their output is useful in practice. We present SWE-chat, the first large-scale dataset of real coding agent sessions collected from open-source developers in the wild. The dataset currently contains almost 18,000 sessions, comprising more than 229,000 user prompts and 2 million agent tool calls. SWE-chat is a living dataset; our collection pipeline automatically and continually discovers and processes sessions from public repositories. Leveraging SWE-chat, we provide an initial empirical characterization of real-world coding agent usage and failure modes. We find that coding patterns are bimodal: in 41% of sessions, agents author virtually all committed code ("vibe coding"), while in 25%, humans write all code themselves. Despite rapidly improving capabilities, coding agents remain inefficient in natural settings. Only 59% of all agent-produced code survives into user commits, and agent-written code introduces more security vulnerabilities than code authored by humans. Furthermore, users push back against agent outputs - through corrections, failure reports, and interruptions - in 50% of all turns. By capturing complete interaction traces with human vs. agent code authorship attribution, SWE-chat provides an empirical foundation for moving beyond curated benchmarks towards an evidence-based understanding of how AI agents perform in real developer workflows.

Key facts. Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 32 of its 80 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2026.

Builds on

32 of 80 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Composer 2 Technical Report25 Mar
  2. 2026SERA: Soft-Verified Efficient Repository Agents28 Jan
  3. 2025Understanding Software Engineering Agents: A Study of Thought-Action-Result Trajectories23 Jun
  4. 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agents30 Apr
  5. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May

Other references · 27

  1. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
  2. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  3. 2024WildChat: 1M ChatGPT Interaction Logs in the Wildcited by 598
  4. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  5. 2021Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot's Code Contributionscited by 417
  6. 2023The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilotcited by 264
  7. 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 254
  8. 2024SWE-bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?cited by 196
  9. 2022Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?cited by 186
  10. 2023Large Language Models for Code: Security Hardening and Adversarial Testingcited by 149
  11. 2025GDPval: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World Economically Valuable Taskscited by 142
  12. 2023Purple Llama CyberSecEval: A Secure Coding Benchmark for Language Modelscited by 130
15 more
  1. 2025Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivitycited by 93
  2. 2024Instruction Tuning for Secure Code Generationcited by 63
  3. 2025Flipping the Dialogue: Training and Evaluating User Language Modelscited by 50
  4. 2026Mind the Sim2Real Gap in User Simulation for Agentic Taskscited by 44
  5. 2025Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotationcited by 43
  6. 2023Security Weaknesses of Copilot-Generated Code in GitHub Projects: An Empirical Studycited by 36
  7. 2025Copilot Arena: A Platform for Code LLM Evaluation in the Wildcited by 25
  8. 2024ProSec: Fortifying Code LLMs with Proactive Security Alignmentcited by 24
  9. 2026Aligning Language Models from User Interactionscited by 21
  10. 2025Nex-N1: Agentic Models Trained via a Unified Ecosystem for Large-Scale Environment Constructioncited by 17
  11. 2025Agent Data Protocol: Unifying Datasets for Diverse, Effective Fine-tuning of LLM Agentscited by 16
  12. 2025When Benchmarks Talk: Re-Evaluating Code LLMs with Interactive Feedbackcited by 14
  13. 2026How Well Does Agent Development Reflect Real-World Work?cited by 10
  14. 2026Invisible failures in human-AI interactionscited by 3
  15. 2026APEX-SWEcited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 36.

36 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2026ProgramBench: Can Language Models Rebuild Programs From Scratch?cited by 47
  2. 2026SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessionscited by 14
  3. 2026Stop Automating Peer Review Without Rigorous Evaluationcited by 12
  4. 2026How Coding Agents Fail Their Users: A Large-Scale Analysis of Developer-Agent Misalignment in 20,574 Real-World Sessionscited by 11
  5. 2026SWE Atlas: Benchmarking Coding Agents Beyond Issue Resolutioncited by 6
  6. 2026Beyond Cooperative Simulators: Generating Realistic User Personas for Robust Evaluation of LLM Agentscited by 6
  7. 2026Dialogue SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Dialogue-Driven Coding Agentscited by 6
  8. 2026ThoughtTrace: Understanding User Thoughts in Real-World LLM Interactionscited by 4
  9. 2026LLMs Get Lost in Evolving User Intentcited by 3
  10. 2026EvoPolicyGym: Evaluating Autonomous Policy Evolution in Interactive Environmentscited by 2
  11. 2026RECAP: An End-to-End Platform for Capturing, Replaying, and Analyzing AI-Assisted Programming Interactionscited by 1
  12. 2026Offloading Score: Measuring AI Reliance Through Counterfactual Workflowscited by 1
24 more
  1. 2026Learning from 53.6K Real-World Developer Edits of AI-Generated Codecited by 1
  2. 2026Beyond Code Generation: Reliability, Verification, and Cost Economics in the Agentic Software Development Lifecyclecited by 1
  3. 2026Plans They Abandon, Reports They Author: The Narrative Layer of Autonomous Agentscited by 1
  4. 2026Control the Harness, Control the Cost: Routing and Governing AI Coding Agents in the Enterprisecited by 1
  5. 2026LLM Anonymization Against Agentic Re-Identificationcited by 0
  6. 2026CurateEvo: Data-Curation Evolving for Agentic Post-Trainingcited by 0
  7. 2026Align AI to Dynamic Human-AI Workflowscited by 0
  8. 2026Heterogeneous LLM Serving with General-Purpose Processing-Near-Memory for Retrieval-Based Sparse Attentioncited by 0
  9. 2026Do Personalized Skills Help Coding Agents? An Empirical Study of Developer Interaction Historiescited by 0
  10. 2026Principal Trait Analysis: Towards Deriving "Skills" in Human-AI Collaborationcited by 0
  11. 2026From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Empirical Study of How Coding Agents Discover, Read, and Write Technical Documentationcited by 0
  12. 2026RealSWE: A Compositional Evaluation of Coding Agents under Realistic User Requestscited by 0
  13. 2026PersonaForge: Realistic Multi-Turn User Simulation for Agentic Systemscited by 0
  14. 2026REVISE: Validity-Guided Recovery for Online Revisions in Agent Workflowscited by 0
  15. 2026Reflections on Trusting Trust, Revisited: Contaminating Self-Modifying AI Coding Agents with Poisoned Benchmarkscited by 0
  16. 2026Red-Teaming Auto Mode: Improving Blocking Classifiers Against Malign Coding Agentscited by 0
  17. 2026The Work Behind Delegation: A Framework for Supervising AI Coding Agentscited by 0
  18. 2026Between the Commits: Process, Error, and Claim Reliability in a Wholly AI-Authored Codebasecited by 0
  19. 2026TraceDance: An Automated System for Building Agent Behavior Benchmarks from Real-World Agent Deployment Tracescited by 0
  20. 2026SecureVibe: Making Vibe Coding More Securecited by 0
  21. 2026Learning When and How to Intervene: A Hindsight-Distilled Sentinel for Coding Agentscited by 0
  22. 2026Coding-Agent Benchmarks Should Match Their Users' Task Flowscited by 0
  23. 2026Code Understanding is a Bottleneck for Coding Agentscited by 0
  24. 2026SWE-Journey: Towards More Realistic Evaluation of Coding Assistants through Long-Horizon, Multi-Turn Interactioncited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026From Conversation to Contribution: Characterizing Coding Agent in Open-Source Software
  2. 2026SWE-INTERACT: Reimagining SWE Benchmarks as User-Driven Long-Horizon Coding Sessions
  3. 2026Investigating Autonomous Agent Contributions in the Wild: Activity Patterns and Code Change over Time
  4. 2026Security in the Age of AI Teammates: An Empirical Study of Agentic Pull Requests on GitHub
  5. 2026Humans are Missing from AI Coding Agent Research
  6. 2026SWE-Touch: Benchmarking Coding Agents When Users Touch the Code
  7. 2026Do AI Coding Agents Log Like Humans? An Empirical Study
  8. 2026From Social Coding to Agentic Coding: Productivity and Relational Reconfiguration in Open-Source Communities