Agent-Generated Code Requires Less Maintenance But Humans Do All the Fixing
arXiv·medium signal
Empirical study of 1,000+ files and 3,200 modifications across 100 repos finds AI-generated code receives less frequent maintenance than human-authored code, with updates affecting only a small fraction of file size. Key difference: most AI code changes add features, while human code changes fix bugs. Developers handle the vast majority of all maintenance regardless of code origin. Accepted at EASE 2026.