"It's a preview of the next management fad, wherein we replace one bad productivity proxy (lines of code) with an even worse one (agent output), then act surprised when quality collapses. And yes, I know, nobody is doing 1,800 meaningful commits. But that's the point. The metric is already being gamed, and agents make gaming effortless. If your organization starts celebrating "commit velocity" in the agent era, you are not measuring productivity. You are measuring how quickly your team can manufacture liability."
"Coding agents would churn out boilerplate at superhuman speeds, and teams would finally ship exactly what the business wants. The reality, as we settle into 2026, is far more uncomfortable. Artificial intelligence is not going to save developer productivity because writing code was never the bottleneck in software engineering. The true bottleneck is validation. Integration. Deep system understanding. Generating code without a rigorous validation framework is not engineering. It is simply mass-producing technical debt."
Rapid code generation via AI increases surface area that must be secured, observed, maintained, and integrated. Replacing lines-of-code metrics with agent output encourages gaming and manufacturing liability rather than productivity. The primary constraints in software engineering are validation, integration, and deep system understanding, not the mechanical act of writing code. Without rigorous validation frameworks, code produced by agents becomes technical debt. Organizations that celebrate commit velocity in the agent era risk valuing throughput over quality. Reducing the cost of writing code without addressing downstream responsibilities increases total work and amplifies long-term maintenance and security burdens.
Read at InfoWorld
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