What is code churn and how has AI impacted it?
Code churn measures the rate at which newly written code is modified, rewritten, or thrown away within a short window. According to GitClear's analysis of 211 million changed lines of code, churn rose from 3.3% in 2021 to 6.87% in 2024, more than doubling in three years.
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The 7.7% Mirage: Why AI Code Generation Is Multiplying Maintenance, Not VelocityAI writes code many times faster, yet median PR throughput rose just 7.76% while code churn doubled. The bottleneck moved downstream.
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More development best practices questions
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