Tan: Professional engineers average only 30 to 50 lines of code daily
Garry Tan · Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers · Y Combinator · May 8, 2026 · at 32:01
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan discusses baseline software engineering productivity metrics when contextualizing his AI agent output metrics.
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“If you look at the literature about software engineering, going back to like 2000. 1990. I mean, it's pretty clear that the average number of lines of code that a professional software engineer that's like tested and production ready, it's not like a hundred lines of code. It's like 50. It's like 30. Like a day.”
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