Signal A coding-tools engineer claims a tenfold productivity gap that he says nobody measures

Summary

In a sidebar interview, Steve Yegge, a veteran software engineer at Sourcegraph and coauthor of Vibe Coding, describes how coding agents change developer productivity. Unlike earlier tools, coding agents can run code themselves, inspect results and iterate without developers relaying information back and forth. Yegge claims people using them are ten times more productive than those who are not, whether measured by lines of code, commits or business outcomes. He says the gap is so obviously an order of magnitude that companies do not even try to measure it, which raises the question of how to handle performance reviews. He traces the measurement problem back to 2022, when acceptance rates of code completions served as the metric until chat-based tools made it obsolete. He adds that humans must still review AI output, acting more like managers of fleets of agents than writers of code.