I think most people would not continue to code if their coding agents stopped working, just like if the internet went down.
replyI agree its not on the same level as the internet/electricity but its been quite a lot more impactful than you are giving it credit for, and that has only been increasing over time.
If agentic coding isn't dramatically changing your productivity you're getting left behind. There's a clear difference between vibe coding and AI assisted software / systems engineering from how I think about things. With AI you can be massively more productive. I do a lot of things beyond code and this is what I've built in 2026 (quick snip from scc, it has proper excludes for node_modules and other pulled in deps that I didn't build) from ~code/ on my dev box:
reply ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code Complexity
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
TypeScript 10,705 2,445,724 191,695 71,737 2,182,292 167,330
JSON 1,435 604,218 58 0 604,160 0
Rust 1,260 718,912 56,372 57,773 604,767 65,562
Markdown 1,087 162,160 36,375 0 125,785 0
SQL 1,046 129,795 6,142 7,389 116,264 1,344
Python 705 168,359 22,710 23,235 122,414 17,962
JavaScript 657 209,397 8,824 7,587 192,986 45,383
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Total 19,009 4,903,248 353,289 186,252 4,363,707 326,094
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $179,262,721
Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 98.79 months
Estimated People Required (organic) 161.19
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Processed 206,138,543 bytes, 206.139 megabytes (SI)
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────But what does "getting left behind" mean? Not producing as many LOC or apps as someone else?
replyThe old "Mythical Man Month" might apply here. Throwing bigger swarms of agents at things and making bigger projects may not lead to more progress and usefulness.
Often it's the small, insightful, well-crafted thing that goes much further than 100 decent projects. Git was a little tool written on a weekend and it went a lot further than giant projects written by giant teams.
What have you actually produced tho?
replyDont talk LoC. Talk about projects.
Absolute cinema - measuring software engineering productivity by lines of code in 2026.
replySure, and how much did this cost you in tokens or subscriptions?
replyReason I ask is sure, you did this but since few people are paying true cost, if prices rises by 10x, is it still worth it?
I can run qwen locally and it's actually pretty good. I'm not worried. Worse case, I'll have to use DeepSeek or something.
replyI never said I wouldn't miss it or that is is useless, just that in comparison to other services I pay for (or the company I work for pays for) I could easily live without it.
I have to ask though, are these lines of code making you money? If so will you continue to need to produce this amount of code over the next 2 to 5 years to continue to profit from your work? I also would point out this argument could be applied to choosing some open source framework over another because of the number of lines of code it contains which doesn't make sense.
reply