---
title: "Lines of code means something now"
subtitle: "Clueless engineering managers are now accidentally right"
description: "When coding agents make typing cheap, code volume becomes a rough measure of how much implementation work an engineer can successfully orchestrate."
author: "Pau Friedman"
kind: "essay"
published_at: "2026-07-06"
url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/07/06/lines-of-code-means-something-now"
markdown_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/07/06/lines-of-code-means-something-now.md"
canonical_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/07/06/lines-of-code-means-something-now"
---

# Lines of code means something now

> Clueless engineering managers are now accidentally right

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.