RECAP: An End-to-End Platform for Capturing, Replaying, and Analyzing AI-Assisted Programming Interactions
For researchers studying human-AI interaction in programming, RECAP provides a novel data collection and analysis platform that integrates previously siloed data sources.
RECAP is an open-source platform that captures, replays, and analyzes AI-assisted programming interactions by merging chat logs and code edits into a unified timeline. Deployed in a university course, it captured 2,034 prompts and 8,239 code edits from 41 students, enabling analyses of developer-AI interaction patterns not possible with single data sources.
Understanding how developers interact with AI coding assistants requires more than chat logs or git histories in isolation; it requires reconstructing the full context: which prompt led to which edit, what the developer tried and discarded, and how their strategy evolved over time. We present RECAP (Replay and Examine Captured AI Programming), an open-source platform that (1) passively records AI chat sessions and fine-grained code edits inside VS Code without disrupting the developer's workflow, (2) merges them into a unified timeline for interactive session replay, and (3) exposes an extensible analysis layer, with example modules for behavioral classification and AI reliance measurement. Deployed in a university software engineering course, RECAP captured 2,034 prompts and 8,239 code edits from 41 students across a multi-week project. We demonstrate how the platform's linked data and replay capabilities enable analyses of developer-AI interaction patterns that no single data source could support.