Zihan Fang

Zihan Fang, Yueke Zhang, Ningzhi Tang et al.

AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor have evolved from code-suggestion tools into conversational collaborators, enabling vibe-coding workflows in which developers guide AI-generated code through natural-language dialogue. Although researchers have increasingly recognized the importance of AI coding agents and begun examining their impact on open-source development, a comprehensive understanding of how developers' chat-based interactions with AI relate to subsequent open-source development and collaboration remains limited. This hinders efforts to effectively design, evaluate, and govern AI-assisted open-source software development. To address this gap, we collected 13,360 AI conversation sessions comprising 79,172 user messages from 1,356 OSS repositories, linked them to repository development histories, and complemented this analysis with a targeted developer survey. We find heavier AI use in smaller, less mature, and less collaborative repositories. After AI adoption, projects tended to show more active contributors and lower contributor concentration (p < .001), although communication remained highly concentrated. Code Writing was the dominant chat purpose, and nearly all AI chat sessions were followed by subsequent commits. We find no broad deterioration in code-quality signals or pull request merging rates. However, developers perceive others' AI-generated code as harder to maintain than their own (p = .029) and view AI as lowering barriers to OSS contribution. While most developers (68%) are willing to share their chat, concerns remain around appearing incompetent, increasing reviewer burden, and exposing ideas to competitors. These findings provide a large-scale empirical characterization of AI-assisted OSS contribution and offer practical insights for designing and governing responsible vibe-coding practices in open-source development.

Yueke Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zihan Fang et al.

Code generation with large language models (LLMs) remains unreliable because generated programs can appear correct while still violating key semantic requirements in the natural language specification. Existing feedback-based methods improve over coder-only generation, but they often rely on unstructured critique or execution signals that do not explicitly identify what the code is semantically missing. We present SCOPE, a prover-initialized subgoal critic for code generation. SCOPE adapts a Lean-oriented prover model to produce three parseable feedback fields for downstream code generation: subgoals, gap analysis, and a robustness checklist. Our approach combines supervised fine-tuning, process-aligned reinforcement learning (RL), and feedback-guided inference, with two complementary rewards during RL: a dense reward for structured critique quality and a sparse reward based on whether the critique improves the coder's execution score. Experiments show that SCOPE improves over the compared feedback baselines. On LiveCodeBench V6, SCOPE achieves 39.4% pass@1, compared with 36.6% for Reflexion and 20.6% for the coder-only baseline. On BigCodeBench (Hard), it reaches 42.6%, surpassing Reflexion at 36.5% and coder-only generation at 34.5%. Further analysis shows that SCOPE's gains are concentrated in tasks with concrete semantic constraints and that its code corrections are more localized than Reflexion's.