Is Agent Code Less Maintainable Than Human Code?
Maintainability is a core dimension of software engineering, shaping how code is written, reviewed, and developed over time. While coding agents have demonstrated strong performance on single-issue tasks, it remains unclear how maintainable their code is when future agents build on top of it, potentially leading to compounding downstream effects. We investigate how agent code compares to human code in these maintenance settings, presenting CodeThread, a framework to construct controlled experiments from repository-level coding benchmarks. Applying CodeThread to four frontier coding agents and four benchmarks, we find that agents are less effective at resolving tasks when building on agent...
| Authors | Shaswat Patel, Betty Li Hou, Arun Purohit et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 19 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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