Instrument the 15-minute window after an AI completion is accepted — that's when 53.6K real edits actually happen, and 31% are deletions

arXiv 2607.25130·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

DECODE captures 53,600+ in-IDE modifications to AI-generated code from 1,000+ developers across Python, TypeScript, and JavaScript, and answers when, why, and how that code gets edited. Most edits land within the first 15 minutes of accepting a completion, and roughly 31% of editing sequences end with the AI-generated completion removed entirely — meaning acceptance-rate telemetry substantially overstates real value. Fine-tuning a 3B open-source model on DECODE beat much larger frontier models at predicting these edits, which is a cheap path to an edit-prediction feature without frontier inference cost.