Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Agent Plans
Agentic AI Coding Tools
Repository-level Configuration
Task Intent
Execution Guidance
An Exploratory Study of Agent Plans for Agentic AI Coding Tools in Open-Source Software
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses a critical gap in understanding how task-oriented Agent Plan artifacts in open-source software guide AI-powered coding tools. For the first time, it systematically identifies and analyzes real-world Agent Plan files from open-source projects by screening 36,710 GitHub repositories and conducting qualitative content analysis focused on Markdown-formatted planning documents. The investigation yields 85 valid Agent Plan files that span key engineering activities—including maintenance, design, and implementation—and explicitly articulate task intent while providing concrete execution steps and validation criteria. These findings reveal the instrumental role such plans play in facilitating human-AI collaborative development and underscore their practical value in structuring and communicating software engineering tasks.
📝 Abstract
Repository-level configuration artifacts allow developers to provide guidance for agentic AI coding tools, such as Claude Code, Gemini, etc. Although prior research has examined repository-shared context files that capture project-level instructions and conventions (e.g., AGENTS.md files), little is known about more task-oriented artifacts such as Agent Plans. We present an exploratory study of Agent Plans in open-source software repositories, examining how plan files are preserved, which development activities they support, and what information they provide to guide agent execution. We screened 36,710 GitHub repositories belonging to engineered software projects and identified 85 Markdown plan files from 10 repositories. Within this highly concentrated corpus, Agent Plans supported several kinds of software engineering work, including maintenance, design, construction, quality-related work, and process support. They also provided task-oriented execution guidance, most commonly through implementation steps, concrete files and locations, and testing and validation information. Overall, repository-preserved Agent Plans under these tool-specific directories appear to be a narrow but informative artifact for studying task intent and execution guidance in human-agent workflows.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Agent Plans
Agentic AI
Repository Configuration
Task-Oriented Guidance
Human-AI Collaboration
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