Adding Thousands of Lines to Your Codebase Isn't Impressive. It's Actually Bad.
Vibe coders brag about adding thousands of lines of code with AI, but measuring productivity by lines of code is like measuring aircraft progress by weight. Research shows AI-generated code has higher duplication, lower reuse, and can run up to 446x slower. Neither max lines nor min lines is the point—code is what you write after you've found something that needs it.
ibe coding has added yet [another layer of abstraction](https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2026/01/11316885/2cQwAOTuB4Q) to programming. There are vibe coders who assume they don't even have to think about code anymore at all—the way web developers don't have to think about assembly or binary. Right?
However, this layer, unlike all the previous ones, is non-deterministic and yet has a far more intensive cost despite that.
You now have the ability to jump right into coding a project without understanding the fundamentals of syntax, or basic concepts like loops, if/else statements, variables, constants, the list goes on. Instead, you rely on the skills of the LLM chatbot to debug and maintain their work. And there's a false assumption that if you simply use a more detailed, specific prompt it'll lead to better quality code—a handy placebo. ["We found that no single prompt consistently outperforms other"](https://arxiv.org/html/2412.14454v1) is often the conclusion you'll get from data researchers.
There is no shortcut for learning and understanding. There are unavoidable consequences for trying to use generative AI to shortcut the work required. Maybe I'm being cynical, but the radical universality that genAI has brought to coding seems to have only lead to far more SaaS spam in my email inbox with saccharine templative language, among other [far more insidious harms](https://brennan.day/ai).
But I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here. (Maybe do yourself a favour and link somebody this article if they ever brag to you about using AI to make an app.)
## The Numbers Just Keep Getting Bigger
To the vibe coders that do attempt to interface with code, there is often a deep misunderstanding of what constitutes productivity in development. They'll brag about adding [thousands of lines of code](https://stephencollinstech.substack.com/p/pushing-ai-to-its-limits-10000-lines) to a project in mere hours, as though this is a good benchmark.
Sorry to put you on blast, Stephen Collins, but don't worry. I'll put others on as well.
Austin Starks wrote an entire Medium piece bragging about having ["vibe-coded" over 160,000 lines of code](https://medium.com/p/c8ee0addef57) for a trading platform. The founder behind NexusTrade published a defensive rant about having [AI help write over a quarter million lines of code](https://nexustrade.io/blog/ai-helped-me-write-over-a-quarter-million-lines-of-code-the-internet-has-no-idea-whats-about-to-happen-20250421), daring critics who called his app a "500 LOC toy project" to go replicate it themselves in a weekend, with the line count somehow doing the rhetorical heavy lifting in the argument.
Cursor's CEO Michael Truell, who tweeted that his team had [built a working browser with 3M+ lines of code](https://w
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