MSR 2026
Mon 13 - Tue 14 April 2026 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
co-located with ICSE 2026

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 14 Apr 2026 11:00 - 11:10 at Oceania V - Session 1-A: AI & Autonomous Agents

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the promise to revolutionize the field of software engineering. Among other things, LLM agents are rapidly gaining momentum in their application to software development, with practitioners claiming a multifold productivity increase after adoption. Yet, empirical evidence is lacking around these claims. In this paper, we estimate the \emph{causal} effect of adopting a widely popular LLM agent assistant, namely Cursor, on \emph{development velocity} and \emph{software quality}. The estimation is enabled by a state-of-the-art difference-in-differences design comparing Cursor-adopting GitHub projects with a matched control group of similar GitHub projects that do not use Cursor. We find that the adoption of Cursor leads to a significant, large, but transient increase in project-level development velocity, along with a significant and persistent increase in static analysis warnings and code complexity. Further panel generalized method of moments estimation reveals that the increase in static analysis warnings and code complexity acts as a major factor causing long-term velocity slowdown. Our study carries implications for software engineering practitioners, LLM agent assistant designers, and researchers.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 14 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

11:00 - 12:30
Session 1-A: AI & Autonomous AgentsTechnical Papers / MSR Program at Oceania V
11:00
10m
Talk
Speed at the Cost of Quality: How Cursor AI Increases Short-Term Velocity and Long-Term Complexity in Open-Source Projects
Technical Papers
Hao He Carnegie Mellon University, Courtney Miller Carnegie Mellon University, Shyam Agarwal Carnegie Mellon University, Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University, Bogdan Vasilescu Carnegie Mellon University
Pre-print
11:10
10m
Talk
LLM-Based Detection of Tangled Code Changes for Higher-Quality Method-Level Bug Datasets
Technical Papers
Md Nahidul Islam Opu University of Manitoba, Shaowei Wang University of Manitoba, Shaiful Chowdhury University of Manitoba
Pre-print
11:20
10m
Talk
Adversarial Bug Reports as a Security Risk in Language Model-Based Automated Program Repair
Technical Papers
Piotr Przymus Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, Andreas Happe TU Wien, Jürgen Cito TU Wien
Pre-print
11:30
10m
Talk
Investigating Autonomous Agent Contributions in the Wild: Activity Patterns and Code Change over Time
Technical Papers
Răzvan Mihai Popescu Delft University of Technology, David Gros University of California, Davis, Andrei Botocan Delft University of Technology, Rahul Pandita GitHub, Inc., Prem Devanbu University of California at Davis, Maliheh Izadi Delft University of Technology
11:40
10m
Talk
Evaluating the Use of LLMs for Automated DOM-Level Resolution of Web Performance Issues
Technical Papers
Gideon Peters Concordia University, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi Concordia University, Emad Shihab Concordia University
11:50
10m
Talk
Are Coding Agents Generating Over-Mocked Tests? An Empirical Study
Technical Papers
Andre Hora UFMG, Romain Robbes CNRS, LaBRI, University of Bordeaux
Pre-print
12:00
10m
Talk
Consistent or Sensitive? Automated Code Revision Tools Against Semantics-Preserving Perturbations
Technical Papers
Shirin Pirouzkhah University of Zurich, Souhaila Serbout University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, Alberto Bacchelli IfI, University of Zurich
Pre-print
12:10
10m
Talk
Beyond the Prompt: An Empirical Study of Cursor Rules
Technical Papers
Shaokang Jiang University of California, Irvine, Daye Nam University of California, Irvine
Pre-print
12:20
10m
Talk
Bridging Design and Implementation: A Study of Multi-Agent LLM Architectures for Automated Front-End Generation
Technical Papers
Caren Rizk Concordia University, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi Concordia University, Emad Shihab Concordia University