The numbers paint a picture of paradox. According to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools in their development process. Yet in that same survey, more developers actively distrust the accuracy of AI tools (46%) than trust them (33%). Only a fraction, just 3%, report highly trusting AI output. The most experienced developers show even deeper scepticism, with senior engineers recording the lowest “highly trust” rate at 2.6% and the highest “highly distrust” rate at 20%. This trust deficit exists for good reason. GitClear's analysis of 211 million changed lines of code reveals that code churn, the percentage of lines reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored, has climbed from 5.5% in 2020 to 7.9% in 2024. The percentage of code associated with refactoring has plummeted from 25% in 2021 to less than 10% in 2024, whilst duplicated code blocks have increased eightfold.…