For the past couple of years we have seeing so many tech influencers, and famous engineers share their opinions about coding with AI, some of them changed their minds few times. Some of the them are paid the change their opinions, maybe not directly paid, but maybe they made an investment or has a partnership with an AI company, whatever. Some engineers still write code by hand and use AI to help them write the boring stuff, others now never write code, they just manage agents, and review code. and some are never even reviewing the output. Now the internet is filled with content about this topic, I have nothing to add, everyone has their own workflow.
However what has been bugging me for some time now is how we are measuring things. we are always seeing people brag about much more code they are writing with AI, but is more code better? can we solve all of our problems with "more lines of code". Is it a quantity or quality issue?
Let me ask you this. which one do you think is better?
A.
let i = 10;
if (i <= 5) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}B.
let i = 10;
return i <= 5 ? true : false
Obviously this is just a simple example, but it shows that more code isn't always better.
Recently, DHH showed these stats in Rails World 2026 while explaining how he retired from writing code by hand and gone "Pencils down" mode in 37Signals.
Which is very weird coming for a skilled engineer. I still do not understand why are we measuring lines of code?
Back in my first year of collage we used to brag about how much code we wrote, but by the end of that same year we were bragging about what we can do with less lines of code, I remember doing a Fibonacci sequence program with C with around half of the number of lines of what my colleagues did, and it was much more performative.
I am not saying that always less code is better, but I know for a fact that more code doesn't mean better, it is not how many lines of code, it is what you do with it.
