AI-assisted code authorship has continued its rapid ascent, and the most motivated developers are shipping more code than ever. But four years of code-change data suggest maintainability signals sliding backward: cross-file function calls (indicative of reuse) are down 35%. Refactoring line moves are down 70%, and long-term legacy maintenance is down 74% vs 2022 levels. Concurrently, we observe a concerning rise in within-commit copy/paste (+41%), code block duplication (+81%), error-masking constructs (+47%), and two-week code churn (+15%). The throughput is real, but so is the debt it accrues, and that debt concentrates among developers who haven’t recognized the failure modes that endanger long-term repo maintainability.
1 quote filed under software / maintainability / duplication, newest first.