When Bots Join the Team: Bot Adoption and the Institutional Fabric of Open-Source Software Projects
AI agents are joining human teams, raising a basic question: when an automated agent becomes a regular participant, does group organization strengthen or weaken? We study this question in open-source software, where bots open pull requests, review code, and merge changes alongside people, leaving a public record of every interaction. Treating bots as participants rather than tools, we examine 2,991 GitHub projects for two years before and after each adopted its first bot. We measure three capabilities that institutional theory links to durable coordination - repeated engagement, social memory, and role differentiation - and two outcomes: conflict cascades and output distinctiveness. Bot a...
| Authors | Yongren Shi, Wenyi Gong |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 15 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 July 2026 |
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