Simon Willison Defends Lines of Code as a Productivity Metric for Agents, Then Names the Real Constraint: You Cannot Review 100x More Code
On the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano, Willison argues the usual dismissal of LOC is wrong in the agent era, since an engineer historically shipped 50-200 lines of production-ready code a day and can now reach a thousand lines of debugged code, which is real improvement if quality holds. His constraint is cognitive, not generative: 'I can churn out code a hundred times faster. I don't have the cognitive capacity to stay on top of 100 times the amount of code,' which is his argument that teams still exist to load-balance review capacity. He pairs it with a conceptual-integrity warning from The Mythical Man-Month via Giordano's Winchester Mystery House analogy: the week-long estimate used to kill bad feature ideas, and when implementation drops to hours, nothing filters them anymore.
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