This paper asks whether a developer’s standing in a project changes how they work with autonomous coding agents. Building on earlier research showing that core and peripheral developers adopt and use AI-powered tools differently, it examines how that difference unfolds once the tool is an agent that opens pull requests itself. Its data is 9,427 agentic pull requests, analysed with a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods across four stages of a contribution’s path to acceptance: how developers use agents, how they review the resulting PRs, whether they modify them, and how they verify them.
The authors present it as the first empirical study of this question, and report four key contributions. Among them, a subset of peripheral developers use agents more often across a wider spread of tasks, while core developers concentrate their agent use on documentation and testing; at the verification stage, peripheral developers more generally are more likely to merge without running CI checks, whereas core developers more consistently require passing verification before acceptance. They offer the results as guidance for both groups on how to collaborate effectively with coding agents.
The paper was submitted to arXiv on 27 January 2026 (arXiv:2601.20106) under Software Engineering (cs.SE), and lists a related ACM DOI, 10.1145/3793302.3793377.
Key Points
- The study analyses 9,427 agentic PRs, which the authors present as the first empirical study of how core and peripheral developers use coding agents.
- A subset of peripheral developers use agents more often, delegating tasks evenly across bug fixing, feature addition, documentation and testing.
- Core developers focus their agent use more on documentation and testing, yet their agentic PRs are frequently merged into the main/master branch.
- Core developers engage slightly more in review discussions than peripheral developers, and both groups focus on evolvability issues.
- Agentic PRs are less likely to be modified, and when they are, both groups commonly perform refactoring.
- Peripheral developers are more likely to merge without running CI checks, whereas core developers more consistently require passing verification before acceptance.