| I've been doing some reading recently around what the literature expects a professional software engineer to produce in a day. In ~1976 Mythical Man Month era it was around 5 lines of fully debugged assembly. Code Complete 2nd edition ~2004 bumped that up to 10-50 delivered lines of code per day. I found other estimates of around 20-60. I need to pull them altogether into a cited article. Based on that plus my own experience I think 100 lines per day of production-level, reviewed and debugged code was a reasonably higher target for a professional software engineer up until just a couple of years ago. Today I'm frequently pushing 2,000 to 4,000 - and that's not vibe coded junk (I can easily hit 10,000+ if I'm not reviewing anything), that's code that I've reviewed and am happy to put my name to. Obviously counting lines of code is a stupid, easily gamed metric. But I still think there's signal there. If you want to build a sophisticated piece of software you're going to have to write a bunch of code to do it. Writing at 1,000+ lines of code per day vs 100 will get you there faster. |