Unveiling the Role of ChatGPT in Software Development: Insights from Developer-ChatGPT Interactions on GitHub

Understand

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced a new paradigm in Software Engineering (SE), with generative AI tools like ChatGPT gaining widespread adoption among developers.

• While ChatGPT's potential has been extensively discussed, empirical evidence about how developers actually use LLMs' assistance in real-world practices remains limited.
• To bridge this gap, we conducted a large-scale empirical analysis of ChatGPT usage on GitHub, and we presented DevChat, a curated dataset of 2,547 publicly shared ChatGPT conversation links collected from GitHub between May 2023 and June 2024.
• Through comprehensively analyzing DevChat, we explored the characteristics of developer-ChatGPT interaction patterns and identified five key categories of developers' purposes for sharing developer-ChatGPT conversations during software development.