DevBots can co-design APIs

DevBots are automated tools that perform various tasks in order to support software development. They are a growing trend and have been used in repositories to automate repetitive tasks, as code generators, and as collaborators in eliciting requirements and defining architectures. In this study, we analyzed 24 articles to investigate the state of the art of using DevBots in software development, trying to understand their characteristics, identify use cases, learn the relationship between DevBots and conversational software development, and discuss how prompt engineering can enable collaboration between human developers and bots. Additionally, we identified a gap to address by applying prompt engineering to collaborative API design between human designers and DevBots and proposed an experiment to assess what approach, between using Retrieval Augmented Generation or not, is more suitable. Our conclusion is that DevBots can collaborate with human API designers, but the two approaches have advantages and disadvantages.