The received wisdom among enlightened software engineers is that lines of code is a terrible measure of engineering productivity. Good engineers produce less code, not more: they delete things, find abstractions, avoid unnecessary systems, and spend large amounts of time on work that is not visible in diffs. LoC mostly rewards visible activity rather than engineering value.
Coding agents change this in an uncomfortable way. The scarce resource is no longer typing code; it is specifying, directing, validating, and integrating work. If one engineer can use agents to ship five integrations, migrate a subsystem, add tests, fix a dozen bugs, and clean up old infrastructure while another ships one feature, the first engineer probably did produce more. The fact that this output materializes as a much larger quantity of code is no longer incidental. My view is that LoC is now a rough proxy for how much implementation surface an engineer can successfully orchestrate.
It is probably still not a sufficient metric. Generated code can be redundant, brittle, or wrong, and the highest-leverage work still happens one level up: choosing the right architecture, defining boundaries, deciding what not to build, and determining whether any of this creates business value. But I think that there is now substantial signal where previously there was not. In an agentic engineering environment, once quality and system-level outcomes are held constant, “how much code did this person ship?” is suddenly a much more reasonable question.