Comment by Wobbles42

I sometimes wonder if the economics of AI coding agents only work if you totally ignore all the positive externalities that come with writing code.

Is the entire AI bubble just the result of taking performance metrics like "lines of code written per day" to their logical extreme?

Software quality and productivity have always been notoriously difficult to measure. That problem never really got solved in a way that allowed non technical management to make really good decisions from the spreadsheet level of abstraction... but those are the same people driving adoption of all these AI tools.

Engineers sometimes do their jobs in spite of poor incentives, but we are eliminating that as an economic inefficiency.