AI coding agents — Devin, Copilot coding agent, Codex, Claude Code, Cursor — open and merge pull requests at scale now. Every agent vendor knows, at the moment of generation, exactly what the task was. My question: does any of that intent survive into the PR in a form a machine could check? And while I was looking: how often do agent PRs cross boundaries that deserve human eyes?
So I scanned 2,204 recently merged, agent-authored PRs on public GitHub repos with a checkout-free policy engine, using only its built-in default policy. It reads PR metadata and file contents through the GitHub API — it never executes PR code and never calls an LLM, so every finding is deterministic and replayable.
The one number that surprised me
0 of 2,204 PRs declared a machine-readable scope for the change. Not a low percentage — zero. Agent vendors emit rich task context at generation time, and none of it reaches the PR as something a machine could verify. If you want to know whether an agent PR stayed inside its intended task, there is currently nothing to check it against.
What else showed up
