The software industry spent decades rejecting lines of code as a productivity metric, with pioneers like Dijkstra and Gates calling it meaningless. Lines of code was officially dead until AI revived it. Now major tech CEOs compete on what percentage of their code is AI-generated, with Sundar Pichai reporting 30% at Google and Mark Zuckerberg predicting AI will handle half of Meta's development within a year.

This resurrection is worse than before. When humans gamed LOC metrics, there was friction - writing unnecessary code took effort. AI removes that constraint entirely. GitHub Copilot tracks "Total Lines Suggested" and "Total Lines Accepted" as primary metrics, while Cursor reports 28.6% increases in lines added following adoption. The industry generated 256 billion lines of AI-written code in 2024 alone, treated as progress despite quality concerns.

The data shows the cost of optimizing for volume. GitClear found copy-pasted code rose from 8.3% to 12.3% between 2020 and 2024, while refactoring lines dropped 60%. METR's controlled trial showed developers using AI tools took 19% longer to complete tasks but believed they were 20% faster. Veracode reports 45% of AI-generated code contains security flaws. More code, worse code, less understood code - and we're measuring the 'more' as if it were a feature.