A Few Pages of Markdown: Committed AI Configuration and Lower Quality Cost after Coding-Agent Adoption

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25241v1
• Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:48 GMT
• Title: A Few Pages of Markdown: Committed AI Configuration and Lower Quality Cost after Coding-Agent Adoption
• Abstract summary: Coding agents increase development velocity but also technical debt.<n>Prior work reports only average effects across adopters, hiding wide differences between teams.<n>We introduce RAMP, a four-level cumulative maturity model grounded in version-controlled artifacts that teams commit to configure AI tools.
• Score: 33.31789388282026
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Coding agents increase development velocity but also technical debt. Prior work reports only average effects across adopters, hiding wide differences between teams. We introduce RAMP (Repository AI Maturity Profile), a four-level cumulative maturity model grounded in version-controlled artifacts that teams commit to configure AI tools. RAMP runs from behavioral rules and coding standards through named agent definitions to multi-agent orchestration, with observed practice concentrated in the first three levels. Across 441 repositories the levels behave as a cumulative scale, and independent human annotation reproduces RAMP's repository-level labels on 97% of a held-out sample. Adoption is cumulative, forward-only, and set-and-forget: 73.8% of artifacts are committed once and never modified. Re-estimating an existing agent-adoption panel within each stratum, agents accelerate development regardless of maturity (28-38% more commits), but quality diverges: among agent-first repositories, where the contrast is identified, those without committed AI configuration show roughly twice the increase in cognitive complexity (+53% versus +27%) and 1.7x the increase in static-analysis warnings. Because maturity is observational, correlated engineering discipline or model capability may explain part of the gap; we present these findings as hypothesis-generating and release RAMP as a reusable instrument.

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