AI's Productivity Paradox: The Hidden Cost of Speed Over Sustainability

While AI-powered development tools accelerate coding velocity, empirical evidence reveals a troubling trade-off: code duplication has surged from 8.3% to 12.3% since 2021, refactoring plummeted from 25% to under 10%, and approximately 30% of AI-generated code contains native security flaws. This erosion of architectural rigor and maintenance practices suggests the industry is mortgaging long-term system health for short-term execution gains.