license: cc-by-4.0
pretty_name: Debt Behind the AI Boom
language:
- en
tags:
- code
- software-engineering
- technical-debt
- ai-generated-code
- empirical-study
- static-analysis
- github
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
configs:
- config_name: repos
data_files: ai_repos.csv
Debt Behind the AI Boom — Replication Data
Data for the paper:
Debt Behind the AI Boom: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of AI-Generated Code in the Wild Yue Liu, Ratnadira Widyasari, Yanjie Zhao, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Junkai Chen, David Lo 📄 arXiv:2603.28592 · 💻 Code: github.com/yueyueL/tech-debt-ai-coding
We mined 302.6K AI-authored commits from 6,299 GitHub repositories across five AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Devin), ran static analysis before and after each commit, and tracked whether the introduced issues still survive in the codebase today.
Key finding: 484K issues were introduced; 22.7% still survive at HEAD, including issues introduced more than nine months earlier.
This Hugging Face repository hosts the data bundles. All code lives on GitHub: 👉 https://github.com/yueyueL/tech-debt-ai-coding
What's in this dataset
| File | Size | Uncompressed | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
focused_repos.json |
1.6 MB | — | Manifest of the 6,299 analyzed repositories (stars, language, AI-commit counts per repo). The authoritative input to the analysis pipeline. |
ai_repos.csv |
0.55 MB | — | Repo metadata (stars, language, primary AI tool) for the same 6,299 repos. (Browsable in the Dataset Viewer above.) |
commits.zip |
48 MB | ~265 MB | All 6,299 <repo>_commits.json files (the AI-authored commit lists). Input to reproduction Tier 3. |
results-out.zip |
978 MB | ~17 GB | Per-repo analyzer output (debt_metrics.json, issue_survival.json, lifecycle_metrics.json, destiny_metrics.json, summary.json + debug/) for all 6,299 repos. Input to reproduction Tier 2. |
focused_repos.json and ai_repos.csv are also in the GitHub repo; they are mirrored here so this dataset is self-contained. The two .zip bundles are only available here.
How to download
These files are tracked with Git LFS — use the huggingface_hub client so downloads
are counted and resume automatically if interrupted:
pip install -U huggingface_hub
# A single bundle
hf download yueyuel/tech-debt-ai-coding results-out.zip --repo-type dataset --local-dir .
hf download yueyuel/tech-debt-ai-coding commits.zip --repo-type dataset --local-dir .
# Or the entire dataset
hf download yueyuel/tech-debt-ai-coding --repo-type dataset --local-dir ./tech-debt-data
In Python:
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
path = hf_hub_download("yueyuel/tech-debt-ai-coding", "results-out.zip", repo_type="dataset")
Reproduction tiers
The study reproduces at three levels of effort. Full step-by-step commands are in the GitHub README.
| Tier | What you do | Time | Disk | Needs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | Browse results/out/aggregate_summary.json via the dashboard |
<1 min | 0 GB | Python 3.10+ (GitHub clone only — no download) |
| T2 | Re-aggregate from saved per-repo metrics | ~5 min | ~10 GB | Python 3.10+, results-out.zip |
| T3 | Re-run the full pipeline from raw commits | days | ~500 GB | Python 3.10+, Pylint, ESLint, Semgrep, git, commits.zip |
T2 — re-aggregate:
hf download yueyuel/tech-debt-ai-coding results-out.zip --repo-type dataset --local-dir .
unzip results-out.zip -d results/
python3 -m src.reporting.aggregate --out-dir results/out
T3 — full re-run:
hf download yueyuel/tech-debt-ai-coding commits.zip --repo-type dataset --local-dir data/
unzip data/commits.zip -d data/
# then follow the GitHub README for analyzer setup + batch run
Schema
Brief notes below; full schemas (including the commit and metric JSON shapes) are in
data/README.md on GitHub.
focused_repos.json
{
"total_repos": 6299,
"repos": [
{"repo": "owner/name", "file": "data/commits/owner_name_commits.json",
"stars": 12345, "language": "Python", "ai_commits": 42,
"total_commits": 5000, "ai_percentage": 0.84}
]
}
commits/<owner>_<repo>_commits.json (inside commits.zip)
{
"repo": "owner/name", "total_commits_scanned": 5000, "ai_commits_count": 42,
"tools_found": {"copilot": 30, "claude": 12},
"ai_commits": [
{"sha": "abc123", "ai_tool": "copilot", "detection_method": "coauthor",
"date": "2025-06-15T10:30:00Z", "url": "https://github.com/owner/name/commit/abc123"}
]
}
License
Released under CC-BY-4.0. You are free to share and adapt the data with attribution to the paper below.
Citation
@article{liu2026techdebt,
title = {Debt Behind the AI Boom: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of
AI-Generated Code in the Wild},
author = {Liu, Yue and Widyasari, Ratnadira and Zhao, Yanjie and
Irsan, Ivana Clairine and Chen, Junkai and Lo, David},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2603.28592},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
primaryClass = {cs.SE}
}