Who Writes the Docs in SE 3.0? Agent vs. Human Documentation Pull Requests
Kazuma Yamasaki, Joseph Ayobami Joshua, Tasha Settewong, Mahmoud Alfadel, Kazumasa Shimari, Kenichi Matsumoto

TL;DR
As AI agents increasingly contribute to software documentation in SE3.0, this study analyzes their role, highlighting their substantial contributions and raising concerns about review practices and documentation quality.
Contribution
This paper provides an empirical analysis of AI agent contributions to documentation in software projects, an area previously underexplored in SE3.0 research.
Findings
AI agents submit more documentation PRs than humans
Agent-authored documentation is integrated with minimal human modification
Concerns raised about review practices and documentation quality assurance
Abstract
As software engineering moves toward SE3.0, AI agents are increasingly used to carry out development tasks and contribute changes to software projects. It is therefore important to understand the extent of these contributions and how human developers review and intervene, since these factors shape the risks of delegating work to AI agents. While recent studies have examined how AI agents support software development tasks (e.g., code generation, issue resolution, and PR automation), their role in documentation tasks remains underexplored-even though documentation is widely consumed and shapes how developers understand and use software. Using the AIDev, we analyze 1,997 documentation-related pull requests (PRs) authored by AI agents and human developers, where documentation PRs are those that create or modify project documentation artifacts. We find that AI agents submit substantially…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · AI in Service Interactions · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
