The machines are rising -- but developers still hold the keys

This means software developers are going to become more important to how the world builds and maintains software. Yes, there are many ways their practices will evolve thanks to AI coding assistance, but in a world of proliferating machine-generated code, developer judgment and experience will be vital. Research done by GitClear earlier this year indicates that with AI coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot) going mainstream, code churn -- which GitClear defines as "changes that were either incomplete or erroneous when the author initially wrote, committed, and pushed them to the company's git repo" -- has significantly increased. GitClear also found there was a marked decrease in the number of lines of code that have been moved, a signal for refactored code (essentially the care and feeding to make it more effective). In other words, from the time coding assistants were introduced there's been a pronounced increase in lines of code without a commensurate increase in lines deleted, updated, or replaced.