AgenticFlict: A Large-Scale Dataset of Merge Conflicts in AI Coding Agent Pull Requests on GitHub

TL;DR

AgenticFlict introduces a large dataset of merge conflicts in AI-generated pull requests, highlighting the frequency and complexity of integration challenges in AI-assisted software development.

Contribution

This paper presents the first large-scale dataset of textual merge conflicts in AI coding agent pull requests, enabling further research on integration issues.

Findings

Merge conflicts occur in 27.67% of AI-generated PRs.

Over 336K conflict regions identified across the dataset.

Merge conflicts are frequent and vary across different AI agents.

Abstract

Software Engineering 3.0 marks a paradigm shift in software development, in which AI coding agents are no longer just assistive tools but active contributors. While prior empirical studies have examined productivity gains and acceptance patterns in AI-assisted development, the challenges associated with integrating agent-generated contributions remain less understood. In particular, merge conflicts, a fundamental aspect of collaborative software development, remain underexplored in this context. In this paper, we present AgenticFlict, a large-scale dataset of textual merge conflicts in AI coding agent pull requests (Agentic PRs). The dataset comprises 142K+ Agentic PRs collected from 59K+ repositories, of which 107K+ are successfully processed through deterministic merge simulation. Our pipeline identifies 29K+ PRs exhibiting merge conflicts, yielding a conflict rate of 27.67%, and extracts 336K+ fine-grained conflict regions across these instances. Our preliminary exploratory analysis indicates that merge conflicts are both frequent and often substantial in AI-generated contributions, with noticeable variation across agents, emphasizing the need to better understand and manage integration challenges in AI-assisted software development. The dataset, code and supplementary materials are available in zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19396916.