Silent Reliance or Diligent Review? Human-Agent Engagement and Interaction Patterns in GitHub
The software engineering landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift as AI coding agents transition from passive assistants to active contributors. While agents now autonomously initiate thousands of pull requests, the sociotechnical dynamics of how humans verify, trust, and integrate agentic contributions remain a “black box”. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical investigation into the human-agent collaborative efforts. By mining a dataset of 212,297 PRs authored by 12 distinct AI agents on GitHub, we characterize the emerging interactions around AI-generated code. We analyze 30,729 longitudinal interaction timelines to map how developers, stratified by seniority, engage with “AI-first” codebases. Our findings reveal a landscape of rapid but passive integration: while human triage is often near-instantaneous (median 0.2 hours), a striking 73.9% of agent PRs are merged without modification, suggesting a high degree of “silent reliance”. Beyond metrics, we explore the sentiment in human-agent discourse, uncovering how developer experience shapes the rigor of AI oversight. By summarizing comment sentiment across developer seniority strata, we find that “expert” developers have a more neutral sentiment towards agent PRs, while others have a more positive take. Lastly, we conclude by outlining future research directions for how to build on this work.
Mon 13 AprDisplayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change
11:00 - 12:30 | |||
11:00 5mTalk | AgentHub: A Registry for Discoverable, Verifiable, and Reproducible AI Agents Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) Erik Pautsch Loyola University Chicago, Tanmay Singla Purdue University, Parv Kumar Purdue University, Wenxin Jiang Socket, Huiyun Peng Purdue University, Behnaz Hassanshahi Oracle, Konstantin Läufer Loyola University Chicago, George K. Thiruvathukal Loyola University Chicago, James C. Davis Purdue University Pre-print | ||
11:05 5mTalk | User Misconceptions of LLM-Based Conversational Programming Assistants Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) Gabrielle O'Brien University of Michigan, Antonio Pedro Santos Alves Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Sebastian Baltes Heidelberg University, Grischa Liebel Reykjavik University, Mircea Lungu IT University, Copenhagen, Marcos Kalinowski Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) | ||
11:10 5mTalk | On the Impact of AGENTS.md Files on the Efficiency of AI Coding Agents Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) Jai Lal Lulla Singapore Management University, Seyedmoein Mohsenimofidi Heidelberg University, Matthias Galster University of Canterbury, Jie M. Zhang King's College London, Sebastian Baltes Heidelberg University, Christoph Treude Singapore Management University | ||
11:15 5mTalk | Demystifying the Lifecycle of Failures in Platform-Orchestrated Agentic Workflows Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) Xuyan Ma Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiaofei Xie Singapore Management University, Yawen Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Junjie Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Boyu Wu Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mingyang Li Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qing Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences | ||
11:20 5mTalk | Towards a Characterization of Microservice Architectures Generated by Large Language Models Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) Renan Alves VIRTUS/UFCG, Federal University of Campina Grande, Ademar Sousa Neto VIRTUS/UFCG, Emanuel Dantas Filho Federal University of Campina Grande - ISE/VIRTUS, Danyllo Albuquerque VIRTUS/UFCG, Mirko Perkusich VIRTUS, Kyller Costa Gorgônio Federal University of Campina Grande, Angelo Perkusich VIRTUS/UFCG | ||
11:25 5mTalk | Beyond Local Code Optimization: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Software System Optimization Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) Huiyun Peng Purdue University, Parth Vinod Patil Purdue University, Antonio Zhong Qiu Purdue University, George K. Thiruvathukal Loyola University Chicago, James C. Davis Purdue University Pre-print | ||
11:30 5mTalk | SciFlowgent: Agentic AI Support for Developing Scientific Workflows Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) Khairul Alam University of Saskatchewan, Saikat Mondal University of Saskatchewan, Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan | ||
11:35 5mTalk | Automated Orchestration for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems: Challenges and Opportunities Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) | ||
11:40 5mTalk | Silent Reliance or Diligent Review? Human-Agent Engagement and Interaction Patterns in GitHub Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) Ziyou Li Delft University of Technology, Răzvan Mihai Popescu Delft University of Technology, Mali Izadi TU Delft | ||
11:45 5mTalk | Toward Agentic Code Review: Reimagining the Process in the AI Era Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) Hüseyin Özgür Kamalı Ankara University, Vahid Haratian Bilkent Univeristy, Erdem Tuna Bilkent University, Eray Tüzün Bilkent University | ||
11:50 30mPanel | (Fishbowl) Panel: AI4SE Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) | ||
12:20 10mTalk | Selection of Full Presentations Journal Ahead Workshop (JAWs) | ||