Isn't this falling into the "lines of code" trap TFA mentions?
More code written is not a good measure of productivity. It could be garbage, or redundant code, or simply not addressing the real or more pressing needs, it could be building the wrong thing, etc.
Like TFA mentions, it's been known for decades LoC is a misleading metric for productivity. It's one of the lessons of software engineering.
The article mentions that coding is only a fraction of dev time and thus accelerating that part of the job can only create incremental gains, and oh PS, lines of code and similar metrics are a bad way if measuring dev productivity, anyway, and we've known that for decades.
The OP claims AI accelerates non-coding parts of the job, too, and so the article is misguided.
Self-reported or observational data capturing time spent for categories of task ala every other similar study in this space?
This isn't exactly novel territory, here, Simon. Let's not pretend I'm asking for something strange, unprecedented, or unreasonable.
How's this? https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/13/datasette-code-frequen...
I have similar charts across my three main open source projects:
https://github.com/simonw/datasette/graphs/code-frequency
https://github.com/simonw/llm/graphs/code-frequency
https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/graphs/code-frequency
Isn't this falling into the "lines of code" trap TFA mentions?
More code written is not a good measure of productivity. It could be garbage, or redundant code, or simply not addressing the real or more pressing needs, it could be building the wrong thing, etc.
Like TFA mentions, it's been known for decades LoC is a misleading metric for productivity. It's one of the lessons of software engineering.
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The article mentions that coding is only a fraction of dev time and thus accelerating that part of the job can only create incremental gains, and oh PS, lines of code and similar metrics are a bad way if measuring dev productivity, anyway, and we've known that for decades.
The OP claims AI accelerates non-coding parts of the job, too, and so the article is misguided.
I ask for evidence.
In response you give me... code output metrics?
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I don't think volume of code changed was the metric the other commenter was asking for.
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People working fewer hours :)
Damn, looks like we have lower productivity than cavemen!
Sir, this is Capitalism.