Willison argues lines of code can measure AI coding agent productivity
Simon Willison discusses how AI is changing software development, arguing lines of code can be a productivity indicator with coding agents, citing a hard limit of 200 lines per day as a meaningful improvement.
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Simon Willison
Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of "How AI is changing software development". We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: "very minor edits to remove disfluencies"). This is the latest version of an argument I've been trying to build about why sometimes it does make sense to talk about lines of code as an indicator of productivity with coding agents, at 35:01 : A lot of people will tell you it makes no sense to measure productivity in lines of code. I’d actually disagree, because there’s a hard limit. In the before-times, a software engineer could produce a few hundred lines of production-ready code per day — and 200 lines of working, debugged, production-level code is an incredibly good day. Most days you’d produce 50 or 60. If agents let you produce a thousand lines of debugged code, that really is a very meaningful improvement — as long a