[2603.27524] Safer Builders, Risky Maintainers: A Comparative Study of Breaking Changes in Human vs Agentic PRs

Computer Science > Software Engineering arXiv:2603.27524 (cs) [Submitted on 29 Mar 2026] Title:Safer Builders, Risky Maintainers: A Comparative Study of Breaking Changes in Human vs Agentic PRs Authors:K M Ferdous, Dipayan Banik, Kowshik Chowdhury, Shazibul Islam Shamim View a PDF of the paper titled Safer Builders, Risky Maintainers: A Comparative Study of Breaking Changes in Human vs Agentic PRs, by K M Ferdous and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:AI coding agents are increasingly integrated into modern software engineering workflows, actively collaborating with human developers to create pull requests (PRs) in open-source repositories. Although coding agents improve developer productivity, they often generate code with more bugs and security issues than human-authored code. While human-authored PRs often break backward compatibility, leading to breaking changes, the potential for agentic PRs to introduce breaking changes remains underexplored. The goal of this paper is to help developers and researchers evaluate the reliability of AI-generated PRs by examining the frequency and task contexts in which AI agents introduce breaking changes. We conduct a comparative analysis of 7,191 agent-generated PRs with 1402 human-authored PRs from Python repositories in the AIDev dataset. We develop a tool that analyzes code changes in commits corresponding to the agentic PRs and leverages an abstract syntax tree (AST) based analysis to detect potential breaking c...