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Comment by hyperpape

7 hours ago

I read this paper several days ago, when my director shared it. Several things jumped out at me:

- the data is mostly from 2025 and earlier

- the baseline mean lines of code per month was 5017, the estimated increase was 1494 lines per worker-month

- the baseline is 5.34 PRs per month, and increased by 1.22

- the baseline mean for code review is 7.03 days

The second and third bullets are confirmation that this is old data. In late 2026, people aren't delivering 30% more lines of code. If people were just producing 30% more lines, they'd still be reading every line. My point isn't that "more lines is good". I'm worried about a few too many lines of code that no one reads. My point is that this shows the data is old.

For the latter, I'm a bit annoyed by using mean, median would be more valuable, but I think it's safe to say that the engineering culture was already pretty bad. If your average pull request sits for 7 days, you evidently don't care about shipping anything, and agents aren't going to change that.

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uncivilized  7 hours ago

You read the paper, saw that the stated collection dates ranged from January 2021 to March 2026, and are claiming the authors are lying?

  • hyperpape  7 hours ago

    If you’d asked reasonably, I might have noted the slight correction (I misremembered that data collection ended January 2026, not March).

    But since you’re such a charmer, why did you read the word “mostly” then lie about me lying?

    It’s unambiguously true that most of the data (including that on coding agents) is from 2025 and earlier.