The study surveys popular, active GitHub repositories across thirteen languages, treating each repository’s AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files as instruction sets for coding agents. It finds that most repositories include such instructions, with CLAUDE.md often referencing AGENTS.md, and that these files contain a mix of project knowledge and workflow rules, including varying stances on AI attribution. The analysis reveals that more popular projects tend to have stricter pull‑request rules and AI contribution guidelines, and that LLM and agent projects are over‑represented among adopters.
arXiv:2509.21891v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models for code editing has typically relied on mining commits and pull requests. The working hypothesis has been...
Agentic coding tools are increasingly capable of generating and submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, introducing new forms of human-agent collaboration in software development. While prior studies have examined PR-level outcomes of agent-generated contributions, less is known about how agentic coding tools are adopted and managed at the project level.
arXiv:2607. 14037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic coding tools are increasingly capable of generating and submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, introducing new forms of human-agent collaboration in software development.
arXiv:2608.29204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI-based software engineering agents are becoming routine contributors to real-world software projects. On GitHub, developers can assign t...
arXiv:2507. 16395v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Atomic commits, which address a single development concern, are a best practice in software development.
Spec-Driven Development (SDD) is a practice where developers and AI coding agents write specifications to guide software implementation, aiming to preserve the intent behind natural‑language instructions. This study analyzes SDD through Reddit discussions, interviews with 21 practitioners (including eight tool makers), and a large corpus of 470,795 spec files from 73,030 GitHub repositories. Findings reveal that while specs often include implementation details that aid agents, they also risk decay; tool-specific structures influence perception, and benefits vary between individuals and teams, with SDD mainly used for new features and involving higher planning and review costs.
arXiv:2602.11988v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A widespread practice in software development is to tailor coding agents to repositories using context files, such as AGENTS.md. Although thi...
The study investigates how autonomous coding agents interact with technical documentation, analyzing 557 coding sessions and 33,097 pull requests. Findings reveal that agents primarily engage with agent-facing artefacts, show weak links between documentation consultation and code editing, lack explicit validation sequences, and tend to consult documentation after code changes. The authors propose a two‑lobed cycle model of agent‑documentation interaction and challenge assumptions about actionability and verifiability of agent‑friendly documentation.
The paper explores whether natural‑language documentation aids coding agents in fixing software bugs and introduces a roundtrip benchmark that evaluates code descriptions by regenerating code and testing it. It finds that description completeness, not length, determines fidelity, and presents an optimizer that can produce fully faithful descriptions that generalize to new files. However, experiments across two model families and ten repositories show that such compact documentation does not improve an agent’s ability to resolve real repository issues compared to using the issue alone.
arXiv:2608. 20195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Technical documentation is written for human developers, but an increasing share of software changes is now authored by autonomous coding agents.
SpecMine is a large-scale corpus that documents Spec-Driven Development (SDD) artifacts in public GitHub repositories. It includes a broad census of 470,795 spec files from 73,030 repositories linked to 17 tools, a focused census of 98,574 Kiro layout files from 12,910 repositories, and a sweep of 5,992 pull requests across 581 repositories that modify specs. The dataset provides enriched metadata, full commit histories, parsed document structures, and over 2.4 million typed references connecting specs to code, sibling documents, PRs, branches, and issues.
arXiv:2607. 09902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic coding tools are increasingly used to make autonomous repository-level changes to real-world projects.