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While several studies highlight productivity improvements, their impact on maintainability requires further investigation.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Objective<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>This study investigates whether co-development with AI assistants affects software maintainability, specifically how easily other developers can evolve the resulting source code.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Method<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>We conducted a two-phase, preregistered controlled experiment involving 151 participants, 95% of whom were professional developers. In Phase\u00a01, participants added a new feature to a Java web application, with or without AI assistance. In Phase\u00a02, a randomized controlled trial, new participants evolved these solutions without AI assistance.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Results<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Phase\u00a02 revealed no significant differences in subsequent evolution with respect to completion time or code quality. Bayesian analysis suggests that any speed or quality improvements from AI use were at most small and highly uncertain. Observational results from Phase\u00a01 corroborate prior research: using an AI assistant yielded a 30.7% median reduction in completion time, and habitual AI users showed an estimated 55.9% speedup.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Conclusions<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Overall, we did not detect systematic maintainability advantages or disadvantages when other developers evolved code co-developed with AI assistants. Within the scope of our tasks and measures, we observed no consistent warning signs of degraded code-level maintainability. Future work should examine risks such as code bloat from excessive code generation and cognitive debt as developers offload more mental effort to assistants.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.1007\/s10664-026-10889-1","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,9]],"date-time":"2026-06-09T09:29:40Z","timestamp":1780997380000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Echoes of AI: Investigating the downstream effects of AI assistants on software maintainability"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"31","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7879-4371","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Markus","family":"Borg","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Dave","family":"Hewett","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Nadim","family":"Hagatulah","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Noric","family":"Couderc","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Emma","family":"S\u00f6derberg","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Donald","family":"Graham","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Uttam","family":"Kini","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Dave","family":"Farley","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,9]]},"reference":[{"key":"10889_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"Abrahao S, Grundy J, Pezze M et\u00a0al (2025) Software Engineering by and for Humans in an AI Era. 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Commun ACM 67(3):54\u201363. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3633453","journal-title":"Commun ACM"}],"container-title":["Empirical Software Engineering"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/content\/pdf\/10.1007\/s10664-026-10889-1.pdf","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/article\/10.1007\/s10664-026-10889-1","content-type":"text\/html","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/content\/pdf\/10.1007\/s10664-026-10889-1.pdf","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,9]],"date-time":"2026-06-09T09:30:19Z","timestamp":1780997419000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/10.1007\/s10664-026-10889-1"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,9]]},"references-count":63,"journal-issue":{"issue":"6","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2026,11]]}},"alternative-id":["10889"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/s10664-026-10889-1","relation":{},"ISSN":["1382-3256","1573-7616"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1382-3256","type":"print"},{"value":"1573-7616","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,9]]},"assertion":[{"value":"3 July 2025","order":1,"name":"received","label":"Received","group":{"name":"ArticleHistory","label":"Article History"}},{"value":"11 May 2026","order":2,"name":"accepted","label":"Accepted","group":{"name":"ArticleHistory","label":"Article History"}},{"value":"9 June 2026","order":3,"name":"first_online","label":"First Online","group":{"name":"ArticleHistory","label":"Article History"}},{"order":1,"name":"Ethics","group":{"name":"EthicsHeading","label":"Declarations"}},{"value":"The design of our study adheres to the essential attributes of the ACM SIGSOFT Empirical Standard \u201cEthics (Studies with Human Participants)\u201d\u00a0(ACM SIGSOFT\n                      \n                      ). Additionally, the peer review of the registered report\u00a0(Borg et\u00a0al.\n                      \n                      ) acted as an independent assessment that the study design meets the ethical standards of the empirical software engineering community. There were no anticipated risks of harm to participants. The task required an estimated time investment of 2\u20134 hours, similar in nature and duration to programming assessments used in recruitment. All participants who completed that task received a signed copy of Dave Farley\u2019s book \u201cModern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster\u201d\u00a0(Farley\n                      \n                      ) as an incentive to complete the task.","order":2,"name":"Ethics","group":{"name":"EthicsHeading","label":"Ethical Approval"}},{"value":"This study involved voluntary participation by developers who completed programming tasks and questionnaires. Before assigning tasks, we ensured that participants understood their privacy was protected, that the study was intended for academic publication, and that they could withdraw at any time without consequence. Several participants chose to do so. All participants gave informed consent prior to participation.","order":3,"name":"Ethics","group":{"name":"EthicsHeading","label":"Informed Consent"}},{"value":"Markus Borg is employed by CodeScene, the company behind the CodeScene analysis tool used in this study, including the CodeHealth metric. Dave Hewett, Donald Graham, and Uttam Kini are consultants at Equal Experts, a company offering AI-accelerated software delivery services among other offerings. Dave Farley is an independent consultant and author who runs the YouTube channel Modern Software Engineering. The authors declare that no commercial interests compromised the scientific rigor of the study design, data collection, or analysis.","order":4,"name":"Ethics","group":{"name":"EthicsHeading","label":"Conflict of Interest"}},{"value":"Clinical trial number: not applicable.","order":5,"name":"Ethics","group":{"name":"EthicsHeading","label":"Clinical Trial Number"}}],"article-number":"161"}}