... individually they are. Perception lags reality. The queue backing up doesn't feel like anything until it does. And a genuine counterweight, because I don't want to write a doom piece. An empirical study out of NAIST and Nara College, presented at EASE 2026, tracked AI-generated files in real repositories for six months after merge. AI-generated files actually received less maintenance than human-written ones, and smaller changes when they did. That's a real result ...