From Social Coding to Agentic Coding: Productivity and Relational Reconfiguration in Open-Source Communities

Abstract:Open-source software communities are a form of digital public infrastructure that not only produces code, but also generates public knowledge and interpersonal relationships through visible collaboration. Generative coding agents (CAs) are an advanced tool to improve development efficiency while shifting part of activities from public human interaction to private human-agent loops. We study this shift using an LLM-based multi-agent simulation initialized with real GitHub data from 1,084 active developers and their repository relationships. After a warm-up with historical commits, we branch the same community state into parallel No-CA and CA conditions for 4-week simulations. CA introduction increases planned and completed tasks by 34.0% and 39.0%, respectively, and reduces median completion time from 45 to 20 minutes. However, adoption reaches only 26.0%, and the gains concentrate among developers who are already more active and well connected. CAs also restructure task execution pathways. Direct human-human interaction declines from 32.4% to 11.6%, while CA-involved modes increase to 57.3%, including 40.3% completed through CA-assisted self-loops. Public knowledge generated under CA condition also provides less support for later tasks. On a standardized retrieval benchmark, the CA corpus achieves 22.3% knowledge coverage, far below the 81.1% achieved by the real-human corpus, and requires more retrieval steps with a lower success rate. These results reveal a productivity-public knowledge tension: coding agents increase technical production, but more work shifts to agent-mediated or private loops, leaving public records less useful to future contributors.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY)

arXiv:2608.03585 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.03585v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.03585 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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