What is the Difference Between Me and You? Benchmarking the Quality Gap Between Human-Written and AI-Generated Code

Title:What is the Difference Between Me and You? Benchmarking the Quality Gap Between Human-Written and AI-Generated Code

Abstract:AI coding assistants are becoming co-authors of production software, yet their evaluation centers on functional correctness, leaving open whether their code differs from human code in the quality dimensions dominating lifecycle cost. We compare human-written and AI-generated code at scale: 787,562 function pairs across Python, Java, and C, each human function mined from open-source repositories paired with implementations generated from its docstring by three AI assistants (OpenAI GPT models, DeepSeek-Coder, Qwen2.5-Coder). We characterize structural complexity and statistical naturalness, and map static-analysis findings onto Orthogonal Defect Classification for defects and the Common Weakness Enumeration for vulnerabilities, making authors and languages directly comparable. AI-generated code is structurally compressed and stylistically templated: roughly half the size and branching of human code, clustering apart at the style level. Defect profiles differ in kind: human code concentrates issues of mature codebases, AI code repetitive boilerplate; security is language-dependent, with LLMs producing more, and more severe, findings in Python and Java but fewer high-severity memory-safety findings than humans in C. Once size is controlled for, complexity metrics carry little signal, while naturalness separates authors. Finally, we release CQBench, a benchmark of 27,346 issue-prone tasks with baselines and an evaluation pipeline for quality assurance and security testing.

Preprint. This manuscript is currently under peer review

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.12708 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2609.12708v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.12708 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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