RESEARCH / EVIDENCE BASE

Why this control plane exists.

The practices in MergeGrounds are grounded in software assurance, supply-chain security, and the measured trust gap around AI-generated code.

The adoption–trust gap

In Stack Overflow’s 2025 developer survey, 84% of respondents used or planned to use AI tools, while 46% distrusted their accuracy. The common complaint was output that is almost right but still expensive to debug. That tension—not a claim that all generated code is bad—is the product premise.

Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025

Supply-chain foundations

Testing as evidence

Coverage answers what executed; mutation testing asks whether tests discriminate between correct and deliberately damaged behavior. MergeGrounds requires both where policy materializes them and treats incomplete reports as not evaluated.

Source: Mutation Testing Elements

Research policy

We separate verified facts, local observations, and product hypotheses. Pages that compare tools include a checked date and link to primary documentation. Benchmarks must publish fixtures, versions, raw results, and limitations before they become marketing claims.

AI-enabled products need another evidence plane

When a model, retrieval pipeline, or agent is shipped behavior, source checks alone cannot validate stochastic output. Our public assurance guide translates research on unfaithful reasoning, delivery speed, RAG, long context, benchmark contamination, and fine-tuning regression into falsifiable engineering controls.

Read the AI system assurance guide