Novice Developers Produce Larger Review Overhead for Project Maintainers while Vibe Coding

Abstract

AI coding agents allow software developers to generate code quickly, which raises a practical question for project managers and open source maintainers: can vibe coders with less development experience substitute for expert developers? To explore whether developer experience still matters in AI-assisted development, we study $22,953$ Pull Requests (PRs) from $1,719$ vibe coders in the GitHub repositories of the AIDev dataset. We split vibe coders into lower experience vibe coders ($\mathit{Exp}_{Low}$) and higher experience vibe coders ($\mathit{Exp}_{High}$) and compare contribution magnitude and PR acceptance rates across PR categories. We find that $\mathit{Exp}_{Low}$ submits PRs with larger volume ($2.15\times$ more commits and $1.47\times$ more files changed) than $\mathit{Exp}_{High}$. Moreover, $\mathit{Exp}_{Low}$ PRs, when compared to $\mathit{Exp}_{High}$, receive $4.52\times$ more review comments, and have $31\%$ lower acceptance rates, and remain open $5.16\times$ longer before resolution. Our results indicate that low-experienced vibe coders focus on generating more code while shifting verification burden onto reviewers. For practice, project managers may not be able to safely replace experienced developers with low-experience vibe coders without increasing review capacity. Development teams should therefore combine targeted training for novices with adaptive PR review cycles.