Why Agentic-PRs Get Rejected: A Comparative Study of Coding Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Nakashima, Sota, Ishimoto, Yuta, Kondo, Masanari, Mclntosh, Shane, Kamei, Yasutaka
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Nakashima, Sota
Ishimoto, Yuta
Kondo, Masanari
Mclntosh, Shane
Kamei, Yasutaka
author_facet Nakashima, Sota
Ishimoto, Yuta
Kondo, Masanari
Mclntosh, Shane
Kamei, Yasutaka
contents Agentic coding -- software development workflows in which autonomous coding agents plan, implement, and submit code changes with minimal human involvement -- is rapidly gaining traction. Prior work has shown that Pull Requests (PRs) produced using coding agents (Agentic-PRs) are accepted less often than PRs that are not labeled as agentic (Human-PRs). The rejection reasons for a single agent (Claude Code) have been explored, but a comparison of how rejection reasons differ between Agentic-PRs generated by different agents has not yet been performed. This comparison is important since different coding agents are often used for different purposes, which can lead to agent-specific failure patterns. In this paper, we inspect 654 rejected PRs from the AIDev dataset covering five coding agents, as well as a human baseline. Our results show that seven rejection modes occur only in Agentic-PRs, including distrust of AI-generated code. We also observe agent-specific patterns (e.g., automated withdrawal of inactive PRs by Devin), reflecting differences in how agents are configured and used in practice. Notably, a large proportion of rejected PRs (67.9%) lack explicit reviewer feedback, making their rejection reasons difficult to determine. To mitigate this issue, we propose a set of heuristics that reduce the proportion of such cases, offering a practical preprocessing step for future studies of PR rejection in agentic coding.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
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spellingShingle Why Agentic-PRs Get Rejected: A Comparative Study of Coding Agents
Nakashima, Sota
Ishimoto, Yuta
Kondo, Masanari
Mclntosh, Shane
Kamei, Yasutaka
Software Engineering
Agentic coding -- software development workflows in which autonomous coding agents plan, implement, and submit code changes with minimal human involvement -- is rapidly gaining traction. Prior work has shown that Pull Requests (PRs) produced using coding agents (Agentic-PRs) are accepted less often than PRs that are not labeled as agentic (Human-PRs). The rejection reasons for a single agent (Claude Code) have been explored, but a comparison of how rejection reasons differ between Agentic-PRs generated by different agents has not yet been performed. This comparison is important since different coding agents are often used for different purposes, which can lead to agent-specific failure patterns. In this paper, we inspect 654 rejected PRs from the AIDev dataset covering five coding agents, as well as a human baseline. Our results show that seven rejection modes occur only in Agentic-PRs, including distrust of AI-generated code. We also observe agent-specific patterns (e.g., automated withdrawal of inactive PRs by Devin), reflecting differences in how agents are configured and used in practice. Notably, a large proportion of rejected PRs (67.9%) lack explicit reviewer feedback, making their rejection reasons difficult to determine. To mitigate this issue, we propose a set of heuristics that reduce the proportion of such cases, offering a practical preprocessing step for future studies of PR rejection in agentic coding.
title Why Agentic-PRs Get Rejected: A Comparative Study of Coding Agents
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04226