A large-scale empirical characterization of AI-assisted OSS contribution is provided and practical insights for designing and governing responsible vibe-coding practices in open-source development are offered.
Abstract
AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor have evolved from code-suggestion tools into conversational collaborators, enabling vibe-coding workflows in which developers guide AI-generated code through natural-language dialogue. Although researchers have increasingly recognized the importance of AI coding agents and begun examining their impact on open-source development, a comprehensive understanding of how developers'chat-based interactions with AI relate to subsequent open-source development and collaboration remains limited. This hinders efforts to effectively design, evaluate, and govern AI-assisted open-source software development. To address this gap, we collected 13,360 AI conversation sessions comprising 79,172 user messages from 1,356 OSS repositories, linked them to repository development histories, and complemented this analysis with a targeted developer survey. We find heavier AI use in smaller, less mature, and less collaborative repositories. After AI adoption, projects tended to show more active contributors and lower contributor concentration (p<.001), although communication remained highly concentrated. Code Writing was the dominant chat purpose, and nearly all AI chat sessions were followed by subsequent commits. We find no broad deterioration in code-quality signals or pull request merging rates. However, developers perceive others'AI-generated code as harder to maintain than their own (p = .029) and view AI as lowering barriers to OSS contribution. While most developers (68%) are willing to share their chat, concerns remain around appearing incompetent, increasing reviewer burden, and exposing ideas to competitors. These findings provide a large-scale empirical characterization of AI-assisted OSS contribution and offer practical insights for designing and governing responsible vibe-coding practices in open-source development.
Generative AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and coding agents have rapidly become part of everyday software development, yet little is known about how mainstream open source communities discuss them in practice. This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of generative-AI-related discussions in the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) GitHub repository, using 43,806 candidate issues created between January 2021 and June 2026. To improve corpus quality, we combined keyword retrieval with semantic relevance filtering, yielding a filtered corpus of 25,227 AI-related issues. We applied BERTopic to the retrieved corpus to identify discussion topics, using the filtered corpus for theme validation and a robustness re-clustering, and analyzed their evolution over time using monthly prevalence and Mann-Kendall trend tests. The results show that developer discussions are dominated by practical concerns regarding the operation of AI-assisted development environments, including agent management, configuration, reliability, authentication, and billing, whereas risks frequently emphasized in survey-based studies, such as hallucination and licensing, rarely surface in this venue. This suggests that discussions of generative AI in the VS Code issue tracker primarily focus on operational aspects of AI-assisted software development. Furthermore, discussions evolved from AI-assisted code completion toward conversational and agent-based development, reflecting the increasing integration of generative AI into software development workflows. These findings suggest that GitHub Issues provide a practical, workflow-oriented perspective on generative AI that complements survey-based studies of developer perceptions.
Panida Rumriankit, Akito Monden, Hiroki Inayoshi et al.· 0 citations
Context: Conversational Large Language Models (CLLMs) can automatically generate code by collaborating with users through natural language. However, poor collaboration can lead to poor quality output. Objective: This exploratory study aims to investigate how humans and CLLMs can collaborate as peers through vibe coding, an approach that integrates principles from prompt engineering, agile design, and human-AI co-creation to enhance collaboration. Method: We designed four interaction models representing different collaboration patterns in the software development process: the solo model (human-only development), the collaborative model (human-CLLM collaboration), the fully automated model (development autonomously performed by a CLLM), and the agentic model (development autonomously performed by the MetaGPT~X platform). Based on these models, we implemented corresponding Test-Driven Development (TDD) workflows using structured prompts and Python scripts. We then conducted a controlled pre-experimental study with TDD professionals to compare the solo and collaborative workflows. In addition, we performed repeated exploratory executions of fully automated and agentic workflows on the same development tasks to obtain complementary evidence. Results: Our findings suggest that the choice of interaction model should depend on the development objective. Agentic workflows are best suited for rapid development and functionally correct production code but may introduce additional implementation complexity. However, they may also introduce additional implementation decisions that are not explicitly required by the functional specifications, resulting in untested decision points. In contrast, collaborative workflows produce higher-quality, better-organized test suites. Conclusions: Our work explored how...
Moritz Mock, Barbara Russo· arXiv.org· 0 citations
An empirical study of configuration prompt files in Cursor, a widely used AI-assisted code editor, shows that .cursorrules files emerged rapidly from mid-2024 and shows that there is a continuity of themes and topics between the now-legacy .cursorrules files and the current standard .mdc files.
Shuang Sun, Jafar Akhoundali, Arina Kudriavtseva et al.· International Conference on...· 1 citation· ⚡1
VibeJam, a browser-based user study platform for users to collaborate with AI agents to develop websites, and open-source VibeJam to spur extensions and support studies on how coding agents can help users.
Nishant Balepur, Connor Baumler, Valerie Chen et al.· 0 citations
This vision reframes AI code review from automated commenting to human-AI sensemaking before integration, and outlines a research agenda for studying review conversations, designing conversational AI review capabilities, and evaluating their impact on software evolution and maintenance.
The resulting prototype confirms that a cloud-hosted multimodal LLM, when combined with a minimal and well-structured web stack, can serve as a practical foundation for next-generation digital assistants suitable for customer support, education, and personal productivity applications.
G. Vamsi, Vinay Kumar Male· International Scientific Jou...· 0 citations
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