As they gain in popularity, AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot may appear to be boosting productivity. But in reality, they could be causing overall code quality to decline.
That’s the top-line finding from a new report released by software engineering platform GitClear, which analyzed 211 million code lines from 2020 to 2024. According to GitClear’s analysis, there was a remarkable decline in code reuse last year — a potential cause for concern, given that code reuse is a common practice to help build redundant systems.
Several recent surveys have shown that AI coding assistants tend to produce mixed results.
One from software vendor Harness found the majority of devs spend more time debugging AI-generated code and security vulnerabilities compared to human-written contributions. A Google report, meanwhile, found that AI can quicken code reviews and benefit documentation, but at the cost of delivery stability.
