The Substrate Collapse: AI Code Generation Invalidates Authorship-Based Knowledge Metrics

arXiv:2606.20882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering has long inferred where a system's knowledge resides from who authored its code. The truck factor, the Degree-of-Authorship metric, and the degree-of-knowledge model all rest on one inference -- that authoring a region of code is evidence of understanding it -- and for most of software's history it was a workable proxy, because code entered a repository only when a human wrote it, which forced at least transient understanding