A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI

A study of Microsoft's early 2026 rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI found that adoption spread through social networks, retention correlated with coding activity, and adopters merged roughly 24% more pull requests than they would have otherwise, suggesting the tools are not mere novelty effects.

Computer Science Software Engineering Submitted on 1 Jul 2026 Title:Adoption and Impact of Command-Line AI Coding Agents: A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI View PDF /pdf/2607.01418 HTML experimental https://arxiv.org/html/2607.01418v1 Abstract:Organizations rolling out agentic command line tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub's Copilot CLI need to know who will try them, who will keep using them, and whether the tools produce enough output to justify their cost. At organizational scale, token spend can run into millions of dollars annually, so misreading adoption, retention, or impact can make a rollout expensive without changing engineering velocity. Studying tens of thousands of engineers at Microsoft over its early-2026 rollout, we find that first use spread primarily through social networks, retention was associated more with engineers' coding activity than with demographics, and adopters merged roughly 24% more pull requests than they would have otherwise. We use merged pull requests as our proxy for output -- acknowledging that a merged PR is not the same as the value it delivers -- and the lift persists across our four-month window. These results suggest that CLI coding agents are neither uniformly adopted nor mere novelty effects and that organizations should treat visible peer use as central to rollout strategy. Submission history From: Emerson Murphy-Hill view email /show-email/420b26ec/2607.01418 v1 Wed, 1 Jul 2026 19:24:27 UTC 454 KB Current browse context: cs.SE References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer What is the Explorer? https://info.arxiv.org/labs/showcase.html arxiv-bibliographic-explorer Connected Papers What is Connected Papers? https://www.connectedpapers.com/about Litmaps What is Litmaps? https://www.litmaps.co/ scite Smart Citations What are Smart Citations? https://www.scite.ai/ Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv What is alphaXiv? https://alphaxiv.org/ CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers What is CatalyzeX? https://www.catalyzex.com DagsHub What is DagsHub? https://dagshub.com/ Gotit.pub What is GotitPub? http://gotit.pub/faq Hugging Face What is Huggingface? https://huggingface.co/huggingface ScienceCast What is ScienceCast? https://sciencecast.org/welcome Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower What are Influence Flowers? https://influencemap.cmlab.dev/ CORE Recommender What is CORE? https://core.ac.uk/services/recommender arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs https://info.arxiv.org/labs/index.html .