2026-10-06T22:27:27Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:28061 2026-10-05T06:44:07Z ddc:004 open_access

A Preliminary Analysis of the Impact of AI Assisted/Generated Code on Quality, Centrality and Review Time at Scale Mockus, Audris Rigby, Peter C. Stewart, Don Maddila, Chandra Nagappan, Nachiappan AI code generation code review software quality context-dependent AI landing rate AI code-generation tools are widely deployed, yet AI is not applied uniformly: its use varies systematically with the context of the task, the code being modified, and the engineer. Studies that do not account for these contextual differences risk attributing to AI what is actually driven by context. Using data from over 10K developers and 400K diffs at Meta, with character-level provenance tracing of AI-suggested code through editing, review, and landing, we model (a) which context factors predict AI code landing, (b) how landed AI code relates to review time, and (c) its association with production outages (SEVs) - while controlling for contextual confounds. We find that AI code lands more often in less central code, larger changes, test files, and for authors with higher tenure. Review time decreases and SEV rates are lower for diffs with AI code, but both associations are confounded by AI code appearing in less central contexts. These findings demonstrate that naive comparisons of AI vs. non-AI work may reach misleading conclusions, and we provide actionable guidance for controlling these confounds. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Audris Mockus and Peter C. Rigby and Don Stewart and Chandra Maddila and Nachiappan Nagappan 2026 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 394, 20th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ESEM.2026.93 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-280619 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESEM.2026.93 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode