I can't think of any use case for AI that is a necessity for myself (or people I know), even if coding agents (which I use every day) disappeared tomorrow it would only be a minor inconvenience that I had to write my own code again. Now lets contrast that with electricity or internet, if either of those went offline I would be on a call trying to get them restored asap, now as far as I know neither of those industries bring in $6T in revenue.

▲ BenzeneDream 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think most people would not continue to code if their coding agents stopped working, just like if the internet went down.

I 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.

▲ bretpiatt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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:

  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  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)
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

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adamddev1 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But what does "getting left behind" mean? Not producing as many LOC or apps as someone else?

The 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.

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batshit_beaver an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Absolute cinema - measuring software engineering productivity by lines of code in 2026.

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stackskipton 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, and how much did this cost you in tokens or subscriptions?

Reason 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?

	▲	voiceeh 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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eurhe an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What have you actually produced tho?

Dont talk LoC. Talk about projects.

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jimmyjazz14 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I 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.