AI Coding Agents Write 180% More Code But Ship Only 30% More Software

InnovationVenture CapitalAI Coding Agents Write 180% More Code But Ship Only 30% More SoftwareByJosipa Majic Predin,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I’m a founder, writer and lecturer focusing on VC funds.Follow AuthorJun 10, 2026, 06:55am EDTTOKYO, JAPAN - FEBRUARY 3: Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during a talk session with SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son at an event titled "Transforming Business through AI" in Tokyo, Japan, on February 03, 2025. SoftBank and OpenAI announced that they have agreed a partnership to set up a joint venture for artificial intelligence services in Japan today. (Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)Getty ImagesCoding agents have cleared nearly every software benchmark that existed two years ago, and venture capital has responded accordingly. But a new MIT study across more than 100,000 developers shows the productivity gap that benchmarks cannot see: AI agents boosted the volume of code written by roughly 180%, while the amount of code that actually shipped to production rose by only about 30%. The gap between writing and shipping is where the real AI investment story is.Venture capital has funneled billions into AI coding tools since Cognition's Devin launched in early 2024 solving just 13% of tasks on the SWE-Bench standard software benchmark. Eighteen months later the best agents score in the high eighties on the same test, a pace of improvement that has convinced many investors that software engineering is a solved market. Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction, argued this week that the investor community has drawn precisely the wrong lesson from that trajectory."Nearly everyone drew the same wrong lesson: the model ate software engineering," Guo wrote. "But as the model swallowed the part of software engineering you can best measure, we're relearning what many teams knew: engineering has always resisted measurement, and the most measurable parts may not...