What percentage of code is copied and pasted?

Here's a fun fact: in an analysis of 58,996 programmers who coded between August 1, 2022 and August 31, 2022, our team found that 13.2% of code was copied and pasted. Relative to previous months, this percentage had little variation (July: 13.3%, June: 13.7%, May: 13.6%).

We collected this data using our Code Time plugin for code editors such as Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ. In our analysis, a copy/paste action was defined as any event in which more than 8 characters were added to a file at once; this allowed us to distinguish multi-character additions from single-character additions and indentations. Auto-completions and replacements were also tracked separately in our analysis, improving the accuracy of our copy/paste algorithm. To get the percentage of code additions that were copy/paste, we calculated a ratio of multi-character additions to total characters additions.

The team at Stack Overflow reported that "depending on who you ask, as little as 5-10% or as much as much as 7-23% of code is cloned from somewhere else." Our analysis says 13.2%.

If you're wondering why any of this matters, it may very well not. But it makes you wonder: how much code is being re-used as boilerplate across projects? Moved between files? Copied from Stack Overflow? We may never know.

All this goes without saying that copying code is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. If anything, it's an indicator of how we build apps today, integrating code from third-party libraries, online documentation, and other sources. 

It will be interesting to see how this metric changes over time.

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