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Study reveals growing technical debt in AI age

Bill Doerrfeld | February 19, 2025

The alarms are starting to sound about declining code quality in the AI age. 

The 2nd annual code quality report from GitClear analyzed 211 million changed lines of code and found 10x more duplicated code than two years ago and fewer signs of code reuse than ever before. Check out my full analysis, published today on LeadDev.


I covered this study the first year it was conducted, in 2024 for DevOps.com. I think the quantitative data finally proves what many of us have been hearing anecdotally. There are gaps in AI-generated code, at least for now.


Getting into why AI-generated code isn't good enough, and how we can improve, is an area I plan to cover with a broader feature story soon — stay tuned!

Read: How AI generated code accelerates technical debt
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