AI Written Code Not That Clean

🔷 Subscribe to get breakdowns of the most important developments in AI in your inbox every morning.

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke in June 2023 posts a blog with the extraordinary claim that CoPilot would add $1.5 trillion to GDP:

Of course, statistics like these are often calculated the same way lost productivity due to the Super Bowl is calculated, without thought to the balancing game theory that counters the effect. And sure enough, the good people at Gitclear evaluate these claims in detail:

Gitclear identified code “churn“:

• percentage of code that was pushed to the repo, then

  subsequently reverted, removed, or updated within 2 weeks by the same author

• normal churn in 2020/2021 was about 3.4%

• increased to a projected 7.1% in 2024

In effect coders are committing more incorrect code, then coming back to correct it later.

Gitclear draws the conclusion that this is AI-driven behavior, which I agree with, even though the evidence here is circumstantial at best.

Become a subscriber for daily breakdowns of what’s happening in the AI world: