Do These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends?

Measuring the Post-Merge Fate of Agentic Code

Paper GitHub

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!

Citation:

@article{postmerge26,
  title   = {Do These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends? 
             Measuring the Post-Merge Fate of Agentic Code},
  author  = {Xia, Chunqiu Steven and Miller, Courtney},
  year    = {2026},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:temp},
  url     = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/temp}
}