Debt Behind the AI Boom: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of AI-Generated Code in the Wild

TL;DR

This large-scale empirical study investigates the long-term impact of AI-generated code on software quality and maintenance, revealing persistent issues and technical debt in real-world repositories.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive analysis of AI-generated code issues in production, quantifying their lifecycle and long-term effects on software maintenance.

Findings

89.3% of issues are code smells, the most common type.

Over 15% of AI commits introduce at least one issue.

22.7% of AI-introduced issues persist in the latest repository versions.

Abstract

AI coding assistants are now widely used in software development. Software developers increasingly integrate AI-generated code into their codebases to improve productivity. Prior studies have shown that AI-generated code may contain code quality issues under controlled settings. However, we still know little about the real-world impact of AI-generated code on software quality and maintenance after it is introduced into production repositories. In other words, it remains unclear whether such issues are quickly fixed or persist and accumulate over time as technical debt. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale empirical study on the technical debt introduced by AI coding assistants in the wild. To achieve that, we built a dataset of 302.6k verified AI-authored commits from 6,299 GitHub repositories, covering five widely used AI coding assistants. For each commit, we run static analysis before and after the change to precisely attribute which code smells, correctness issues, and security issues the AI introduced. We then track each introduced issue from the introducing commit to the latest repository revision to study its lifecycle. Our results show that we identified 484,366 distinct issues, and that code smells are by far the most common type, accounting for 89.3% of all issues. We also find that more than 15% of commits from every AI coding assistant introduce at least one issue, although the rates vary across tools. More importantly, 22.7% of tracked AI-introduced issues still survive at the latest version of the repository. These findings show that AI-generated code can introduce long-term maintenance costs into real software projects and highlight the need for stronger quality assurance in AI-assisted development.