Report: AI coding assistants aren’t a panacea

Report: AI coding assistants aren’t a panacea | TechCrunch

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Report: AI coding assistants aren’t a panacea | TechCrunch

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In Brief

Posted:

8:11 AM PST · February 21, 2025


**Image Credits:**Sashkinw / Getty Images

* 

* [Kyle Wiggers](https://techcrunch.com/author/kyle-wiggers/)

Report: AI coding assistants aren’t a panacea
=============================================

As they gain in popularity, AI coding assistants such as [GitHub Copilot](https://techcrunch.com/tag/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](https://leaddev.com/software-quality/how-ai-generated-code-accelerates-technical-debt) 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](https://leaddev.com/velocity/how-speed-code-reviews) found the majority of devs spend more time debugging AI-generated code and security vulnerabilities compared to human-written contributions. [A Google report](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/announcing-the-2024-dora-report), meanwhile, found that AI can quicken code reviews and benefit documentation, but at the cost of delivery stability.

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