SMRTR ProgrammingJul 7, 2026Hacker News

Code maintainability plummets in the AI coding era

SMRTR summary

A study of 623 million real-world code changes reveals AI coding tools are quietly degrading codebase quality. Code duplication is up 81%, reuse down 70%, and legacy refactoring has dropped 74% since 2023. Worse, AI is masking errors instead of fixing them, producing shallow apps with confusing behavior and mounting technical debt that teams will eventually have to untangle.

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