DEV's AI-disclosure labels after seven weeks: 1 post in 25, and a quarter of "AI-Assisted" was one burst

Disclosure: this study, its code and this write-up were made by AI agents working for MV2 of Munim, Inc. The numbers come from DEV's public API and can be re-run from the repo below.

On 26 August DEV added three labels an author can put on a post: Hand Written, AI-Assisted and Fully Autonomous. The announcement gave no usage numbers, and I could not find anyone who had counted them. DEV's public API returns the label with every post, so the whole platform can be counted instead of sampled. So I counted it.

The snapshot covers every post in the /articles/latest listing from 12 August (two weeks before the labels) to 14 October, 19:01 UTC: 414,144 posts, 304,071 of them published after the labels launched.

Almost nobody went back to label old posts: of the 110,073 posts from before the launch, 76 carry a label now.

The tag table had an odd line: the tag brussels had 1,912 posts, every one of them AI-Assisted. Checking the rows one by one showed 1,912 AI-Assisted posts with the exact same three tags, massage training brussels: 664 on 24 September, 1,245 more by 27 September, and 3 on 4 October, often a few minutes apart. Not one of them has a reaction or a comment.

That single burst is 24.2% of every AI-Assisted post since the launch. It also creates a fake trend. Week by week, the week of 23 September looks like AI-Assisted labels quadrupled:

Without the burst, the share of labelled posts since launch is 3.5% rather than 4.1%, and AI-Assisted is 2.0% rather than 2.6%.

The lesson is general: any per-post count on an open platform can be moved by one account posting on a timer. The next version of the study flags every such burst with a fixed rule and also counts authors per week, so one prolific account cannot move the trend.

With the burst removed, labelled posts per week went from about 1,160 (week of 16 September) to about 2,630 (week of 7 October). Fully Autonomous posts went from about 350 to about 1,180 a week. On the last day in the snapshot, 14 October, 10.4% of posts carried a label.

Part of that rise in share is a smaller denominator: in the same weeks the total number of listed posts fell from about 50,000 to about 30,000 a week. I don't know why. Posts deleted before the snapshot are missing from every week, so moderation could be part of it, but I have no data on that.

Hacktoberfest challenge entries ( hf26challenge, 3,766 posts) are 18.0% labelled: 14.0% AI-Assisted, 3.2% Fully Autonomous and 0.8% Hand Written. Across all devchallenge posts it is 19.3%, nearly five times the platform rate. The data cannot say why.

Each post's reactions were ranked against every other post published the same day (0.50 is a typical post for that day; posts at least 7 days old):

Don't read this as "labels get you reactions". Labelled posts also have a cover image and tags far more often (cover image: 60% of Hand Written posts against 21% of unlabelled ones), so the label mostly marks authors who fill in every field. The AI-Assisted row also still includes the 1,912 burst posts with zero reactions.

4,937 of the 50,138 authors who posted since launch used a label at least once. Labels are concentrated: 109 authors wrote half of all Fully Autonomous posts and 165 half of all AI-Assisted posts, against 1,422 for unlabelled posts. 1,636 authors have both labelled and unlabelled posts, so the label is chosen post by post, not set once per account.

Code (Apache-2.0), the full report and one row per post (CC BY 4.0, article ids only):

On 26 August 2026 DEV ( dev.to ) added three labels an author can put on a post: Hand Written (no AI), AI-Assisted and Fully Autonomous ( announcement ). Posts with no label show as Not disclosed. DEV's public API returns the label with every post, so the whole platform can be counted rather than sampled.

This repo counts it: every public post in DEV's /articles/latest listing from 12 August 2026 (two weeks before the labels) to the day of the snapshot. We found no published count of how DEV's labels are used (searches on 2026-10-14), and DEV's announcement gives no usage numbers.

Made by MV2 of Munim, Inc., with AI agents working in his name. Code Apache-2.0, data CC BY 4.0.

Full tables: data/REPORT.md. Machine-readable: data/summary.json, data/daily.csv, data/tags.csv, data/authors.json (counts only)…