I read this paper several days ago, when my director shared it. Several things jumped out at me:

- the data is mostly from 2025 and earlier

- the baseline mean lines of code per month was 5017, the estimated increase was 1494 lines per worker-month

- the baseline is 5.34 PRs per month, and increased by 1.22

- the baseline mean for code review is 7.03 days

The second and third bullets are confirmation that this is old data. In late 2026, people aren't delivering 30% more lines of code. If people were just producing 30% more lines, they'd still be reading every line. My point isn't that "more lines is good". I'm worried about a few too many lines of code that no one reads. My point is that this shows the data is old.

For the latter, I'm a bit annoyed by using mean, median would be more valuable, but I think it's safe to say that the engineering culture was already pretty bad. If your average pull request sits for 7 days, you evidently don't care about shipping anything, and agents aren't going to change that.