> The researchers found that the number of code blocks with 5 or more duplicated lines increased by 8 times during 2024. Counterpoint: devs would have written

> The researchers found that the number of code blocks with 5 or more duplicated lines increased by 8 times during 2024. Counterpoint: devs would have written duplicate-functionality code anyways, but it wouldn't have shown up as an exact match in years prior. LLMs seem to bring a kind of consistency in variable naming, comments, structure, etc. that people (and teams of people) don't usually have. > The researchers also noted a 39.9 percent decrease in the number of moved lines. The chart shows moved lines dropping dramatically since 2021, and "churn" increasing dramatically by the same amount. Neither of these seem remotely plausible and date to well before LLM's, and rather suggest some kind of measurement artifact. That something is causing moved code to be increasingly classified as "churn", probably because something about it isn't an exact precise match. But if you consider churn to be refactoring (which is very plausible) then refactoring is actually increasing, totally opposite of the article's conclusion.