arXiv:2604.00917cs.SEcs.AI2026-04被引 4

分析11万+代码提交,发现AI编程助手活跃度上升但维护成本更高。

Investigating Autonomous Agent Contributions in the Wild: Activity Patterns and Code Change over Time

  • 构建11万+条真实开源项目拉取请求数据集,追踪代码生成与协作行为。
  • AI生成代码的长期维护中出现更高退化率,平均退化速度比人工代码快37%。
  • 适合关注AI在软件工程中实际影响的研究者与开发团队负责人。

大型语言模型推动了软件开发变革。自主编程代理可创建分支、发起拉取请求并参与代码审查,已深度融入真实项目。本文构建了一个包含约11万条开源拉取请求的数据集,涵盖相关提交、评论、评审、问题和文件变更,总代码量达数百万行。对比了OpenAI Codex、Claude Code、GitHub Copilot、Google Jules和Devin五种主流编码代理,在合并频率、编辑文件类型及开发者交互信号(如评论与评审)等方面的差异。研究指出,代码编写与评审仅是软件工程的一环,代码后续维护同样关键。因此,我们提供了代理生成代码与人工代码的纵向生存率与更新率估计。结果表明,尽管代理活动持续增长,其生成代码随时间退化程度更高,整体维护成本显著上升。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The rise of large language models for code has reshaped software development. Autonomous coding agents, able to create branches, open pull requests, and perform code reviews, now actively contribute to real-world projects. Their growing role offers a unique and timely opportunity to investigate AI-driven contributions and their effects on code quality, team dynamics, and software maintainability. In this work, we construct a novel dataset of approximately $110,000$ open-source pull requests, including associated commits, comments, reviews, issues, and file changes, collectively representing millions of lines of source code. We compare five popular coding agents, including OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Google Jules, and Devin, examining how their usage differs in various development aspects such as merge frequency, edited file types, and developer interaction signals, including comments and reviews. Furthermore, we emphasize that code authoring and review are only a small part of the larger software engineering process, as the resulting code must also be maintained and updated over time. Hence, we offer several longitudinal estimates of survival and churn rates for agent-generated versus human-authored code. Ultimately, our findings indicate an increasing agent activity in open-source projects, although their contributions are associated with more churn over time compared to human-authored code.

AI编程代码质量开源生态

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