We're using the wrong measure for LLM productivity

Timo Geusch — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 11:31:00 -0500

I’ve been spending a bit of time on LinkedIn lately after finally stopping my use of Xitter (you can find me on Mastodon instead). One of the tropes that I see being uncritically spouted over and over again is “I’m sooooooo productive, by spending $gazillion in LLM credits a day I’ll generate my new product at 50,000 lines of code day”.

While I’m applauding your effort to build a new, much needed product to fill a gaping hole in the market place, I’m sorry my dude (because it’s almost always a dude), but all you’re doing is generating technical debt at high velocity for a brief amount of time. Jon Bentley pointed out in his essays that turned into the book “Programming Pearls” (look it up) back in the 1980s that confusing, I’m sorry, measuring productivity by looking at the lines of code written is All The Wrong Measurements.

Llm on The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

We're using the wrong measure for LLM productivity