Govern the Repository, Not the Agent: Measuring Ecosystem-Level Risk in AI-Native Software
Autonomous coding agents now open and merge pull requests in shared repositories at scale, and the field evaluates them the way it has always evaluated components, one agent at a time, on isolated benchmark tasks. Yet agents that each pass their own tests still leave repositories that accumulate problems no single contribution accounts for. We ask whether this problem belongs to the individual agent or to the repository where it accumulates. We study integration friction, the cost of integrating a contribution into a codebase that other contributors are concurrently changing. Across more than 930,000 agent-authored pull requests, we measure how much of the variation in friction stays with...
| Authors | Daniel Russo |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 26 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 June 2026 |
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