To give some additional data here from the frontlines of using agents to write code, indeed we are producing a lot more code, but you’re right that overall productivity is up less than you’d expect. Beyond verbosity, which is an issue, there’s lots of changes now that are of marginal value that we wouldn’t have made before but are now cheap to do. Some examples include:
automation of low-priority bug fixes and security vulnerabilities
better internal tooling that solves minor annoyances
gold-plating features that would otherwise have been MVPs
In fact, the main bottleneck I see right now is product ideation, not coding. That is, the main reason we can’t do more faster is we don’t have great product ideas faster. Instead, we can test more product ideas more quickly, but we find good ones about as often as before, we’re just able to validate more of these ideas in code for lower cost than we could have before.
To give some additional data here from the frontlines of using agents to write code, indeed we are producing a lot more code, but you’re right that overall productivity is up less than you’d expect. Beyond verbosity, which is an issue, there’s lots of changes now that are of marginal value that we wouldn’t have made before but are now cheap to do. Some examples include:
automation of low-priority bug fixes and security vulnerabilities
better internal tooling that solves minor annoyances
gold-plating features that would otherwise have been MVPs
In fact, the main bottleneck I see right now is product ideation, not coding. That is, the main reason we can’t do more faster is we don’t have great product ideas faster. Instead, we can test more product ideas more quickly, but we find good ones about as often as before, we’re just able to validate more of these ideas in code for lower cost than we could have before.