Stop Measuring Engineers by Lines of Code

Great engineers aren't measured by how much code they produce. They're measured by the quality of their decisions. The right decisions don't just fix today's issue - they keep your team moving fast tomorrow. In an era where AI can generate code in seconds, what separates average from exceptional engineers is the judgment to choose the right path, avoid needless rewrites, and build velocity that lasts.

The engineers I have seen stand out are not the ones who type the fastest. They are the ones who:

• Know when not to over-engineer
• Avoid shortcuts that create endless refactors
• Build in a way that sustains product velocity instead of slowing it down

The Trap Most Teams Fall Into

Too many leaders get stuck in a false tradeoff. Push for speed and you drown later in tech debt. Push for rigor and you stall in review cycles that kill momentum.

Good leaders do not accept that tradeoff. The job is to build a culture where the team can move fast and still get the design right.

What Great Leadership Looks Like

At Google, I saw how the best tech leads pushed hard on design quality. They thought deeply about tradeoffs before a single line of code was written.

At Stripe, I learned the other side of it: the strongest leaders anchored design decisions in product context. They could:

• Translate design into a concrete rollout plan
• Build in observability and resilience from the start
• Define success in terms of real product outcomes, not just technical milestones

That combination is what separates good engineering from great engineering leadership. It is not just about clean design. It is about design that drives the business forward.

Why This Matters More Now

Code is becoming cheaper and faster to produce. AI tools will only accelerate that. The bottleneck is no longer typing code. The bottleneck is making the right calls:

• Which design moves us faster without slowing us later
• How do we balance today's needs with tomorrow's scale
• How do we make sure AI agents are building inside the right guardrails

And here is the key point: AI does not mean you no longer need junior engineers. It means they need a different kind of support. Today's tools don't give them the structure to direct AI agents on technical decisions. Without that, they are stuck generating code without the judgment that determines long-term success.

The Edge Nuvineer Creates

This is why we are building Nuvineer.

Nuvineer gives engineering leaders visibility into the decisions shaping their systems, not just the commits. It embeds the judgment of seasoned tech leads into the workflows of every engineer and every AI agent. It creates the guardrails that allow less experienced engineers to make better calls, and to learn by seeing how those decisions connect back to design, rollout, and product outcomes.

Because in the future, the strongest engineering orgs will not be the ones who produce more code. They will be the ones who make better decisions, and who can scale that judgment across every engineer and every agent.