Data package for "How developers split roles among them and a coding agent and what 'collaboration' means"

Methods

We perform a 3-step, mixed-methods study. We apply qualitative open coding to 2025 early adopters’ blog articles for deriving the role-split they used. We perform a quantitative survey of 2026 practitioners for measuring their general attitudes and role-split.</p><p dir="ltr">We develop a method for coding-agent-supported open coding of survey freetext responses and apply it to a question regarding the desired manner of collaboration between human and agent.<br>Results: The 2025 practitioners split roles such that all intent formation, all major design decisions, and all accept/non-accept decisions were reserved for the human; the agent would work almost exclusively in supporting roles.

Accountability was completely and firmly human. In 2026, the split and accountability attitude are fundamentally the same, even for most respondents not actually using coding agents. Gradually, however, the split is now different, with much more agent involvement mixed into many work types that were previously human-only.

The 2026 developers’ notion of collaboration has three facets: Predominantly a separation into human-only, agent-only, and collaborative work steps, with defined conditions and goals of the collaboration. Second, sometimes, accommodating</p><p dir="ltr">certain personal preferences without an engineering justification. Third, sometimes, a holistic view of collaboration covering the entire development process.<br>Conclusions: The trend towards more agent involvement is likely to continue, so that defining one’s role relative to the agent will need to be a recurring activity.

The different views on collaboration are likely a source of friction and conflict for teams and future work should find out how to cope with that.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">The data package contains questionnaire, raw data, open coding skill, evaluation software, some computed results, and a PDF of the article draft itself.</p>