arXiv AI
Oct 26

What Open-Source Projects Tell Their Coding Agents: A Census of AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md

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.

By Pawel Zarzycki
arXiv AI
Oct 31

How Do Developers Edit AI-Generated Code, and How Well Do LLMs Infer Their Edits? Insights from 53.6K Developer Edits

The paper introduces DECODE, a dataset of 53.6K real‑world in‑IDE edits of AI‑generated code from over 1,000 developers, and uses it to study when, why, and how developers modify such code. Findings show developers spend little effort editing and often abandon AI outputs, highlighting the need for LLMs to infer intent from edits. Experiments reveal that while frontier models can generate edits that align with developer intent, they tend to over‑edit and revert changes; fine‑tuning improves performance but does not fully close the gap.

By Jenny T. Liang, Mihika Bairathi, Wayne Chi, Ameet Talwalkar, Nishant Subramani, Valerie Chen