{"id":565,"date":"2026-09-02T08:26:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T13:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidwdrell.net\/wordpress\/?p=565"},"modified":"2026-09-02T08:26:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T13:26:47","slug":"how-bots-made-me-16-8-times-more-productive-and-i-have-the-data-to-prove-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidwdrell.net\/wordpress\/?p=565","title":{"rendered":"How bots made me 16.8 times more productive, and I have the data to prove it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Measuring four and a half years of commits<\/div>

How bots made me 16.8\u00d7 more productive, and I have the data to prove it<\/h1>

I have been building an embedded C++ control and image processing daemon on Jetson for four and a half years. It started with a small team; for the last two years it has been just me. Over time I started using co-pilot then claude. Here is how the project throughput increased over time.<\/p>

This article doesn’t cover quality or performance, but let me address this briefly. The test suite has grown to more than 800 cases, over 400 of them added in 2026. Performance is up more than 20x, on the back of extensive CUDA work that would not have fit the schedule without bots. And end users have reported zero regressions in two years.<\/p>

16.8\u00d7<\/div>

The median developer-week now moves 4,792 lines<\/strong> of authored source. In 2022 it moved 285<\/strong>.<\/p><\/div>

First: how I calculated the numbers<\/h2>

git log --numstat<\/code> will tell you a repository has churned 2.8 million lines. Most of that is not work anyone did, so I threw it out in three passes before counting anything. Here are the major areas excluded from my counts:<\/p>