I audited 162 agent-written PRs – 27% were the AI fixing itself

Commensa released an open-source tool, commensa-audit, that analyzes GitHub repositories to measure the percentage of engineering effort spent correcting AI-generated code. The company's own audit of 162 PRs found that 27% were the AI fixing itself, highlighting the need to distinguish progress from cleanup in agent-era development.

What % of your AI engineering effort went to fixing your AI's own work? commensa-audit answers that from your git history. Point it at a GitHub repo; get a one-page report: Rework tax — share of PRs and changed lines that corrected earlier work, vs. net-new value Superseded work — PRs whose output was entirely replaced later shown separately — discarded ≠ correcting Abandoned attempts — PRs closed without merging: the waste merge-based metrics never see Churn clusters — chains of PRs rewriting each other "it took 10 PRs to get dark mode right" Line survival — how much merged code is still alive at the end of the window Hotspots — rework share by module, against the repo-wide rate Agent-marked share — "at least X% of PRs carry agent markers" Co-Authored-By trailers, body signatures — a stated lower bound, never an attribution claim We built it because we needed it: our own agent-built product shipped 162 PRs in 13 days, and the audit showed 27% of them were the AI correcting itself . pip install commensa-audit commensa-audit --repo owner/name --token $GH TOKEN Or straight from source: pip install git+https://github.com/commensa-ai/commensa-audit Output: report <repo .html self-contained, forwardable , audit <repo .json raw numbers , units.csv per-PR data . By default the audit covers the newest 500 PRs — a safety cap so a naive run on a huge repo stays fast and bounded. When it truncates, the run prints a notice telling you how to raise it. Two optional flags control the window both newest-first : commensa-audit --repo owner/name --since 2026-03-14 --max-prs 150 --since YYYY-MM-DD — only PRs created on/after this UTC date --max-prs N — cap to the N newest PRs default 500 ; use --max-prs 0 for no cap Both early-stop pagination, so --max-prs 150 costs ~150 PRs' worth of API calls, not the repo's entire history. Run with no flags on a repo under 500 PRs and you get everything, exactly as before. Read-only. GET requests only; a token with read scope is sufficient. Local-first. Everything runs and stays on your machine. No telemetry, no phone-home, nothing leaves your network. Inspectable. Pure Python, stdlib + requests + jinja2 . Read every line before you run it. Every PR is classified by a transparent signal cascade — explicit corrective titles/reverts → self-correction a PR predominantly undoing lines added in the prior N days → churn-cluster membership → otherwise generative. Every classification in the output carries the signal that fired and a human-readable why. Thresholds live in one config block; tune them and re-run offline with --reuse . Known limits also printed in the report footer : classification is heuristic; squash merges blur attribution; survival windows mean young repos read optimistic; agent-marked share is a lower bound — absence of a marker is not evidence of human authorship. We grade our own certainty rather than fake precision — that's the whole point of the project. Agent-era teams measure activity — PRs merged, lines shipped, velocity. None of that distinguishes progress from cleanup. The rework tax does: it's the share of motion that was correction, the closest git-only proxy for "how well was this work directed?" It won't tell you everything cost-per-outcome needs token data git doesn't have — that's what we're building next https://commensa.ai — but it's the most honest first number, and it's free. This tool is a snapshot. Commensa https://commensa.ai is the trendline: continuous rework measurement by team and module, alerts, monthly executive reports — and the cost side git can't see, captured at the agent harness. First 25 companies: founding-partner terms. measure the durable work, not the noise. MIT licensed.