Measuring the Post-Merge Fate of Agentic Code #
First longitudinal empirical study of the post-merge lifecycle of agentic and human code in real-world open source projects.
182
public GitHub repositories 30K+ agentic commits
121M+ lifecycle lines tracked
12 maintenance operational intents
143K+ security & dependency findings
1 year May 2025 to May 2026
Finding Highlights: #
46% higher corrective maintenance rates than human contributions
1.51x times more high-severity static security findings than human contributions
Agentic code share increases the corrective maintenance burden within projects
No review rate increases the agentic maintenance burden of a project
Interested to learn more? Check out the interactive visualization to play with the data yourself!
source & further reading
post-merge-reality.github.io — original article