Beyond the Prompt: Linking What Developers Ask, Do, and Understand with Coding Agents

Abstract

Coding agents can now change code for developers, who describe goals, supply context, and respond to the agent's work. Yet prompts, screen activity, and task success each tell only part of this story. We present Say, Do, Understand, an end-to-end workflow for analyzing what developers write to an agent, what they do while it works, and what they can explain afterwards. The workflow has five stages (Capture, Prepare, Analyze, Integrate, and Interpret) and three instruments: a prompt codebook, a scheme for coding screen-recorded activities and events, and separate rubrics for explaining the process and the solution. We applied it in an observational study of ten experienced developers who used GitHub Copilot on an unfamiliar codebase. Crossing task performance with understanding produced four personas. The two measures agreed for eight developers but split for two: one passed most tests but could not explain the solution, and another passed few tests but explained it well. In this sample, the personas that most often asked the agent to check its work spent the least time testing on their own. These patterns are descriptive and do not generalize beyond the sample. We recommend the workflow to computing educators, industry practitioners, and researchers to adapt and evaluate human--AI communication in software engineering.