It is less about who writes the code, and more about who is responsible for it

In the recent marketing pushes for different agentic coding tools, it seems more and more popular to brag about what percentage of your code is written by agentic tools. To me, this is a largely irrelevant and misleading metric. I think it is more important to consider who is responsible for the code. The moment you look at the code and review it, you become responsible for it, regardless of what fraction of the code was written by the agent.

For example, in my personal usage, while agentic coding tools have gone from writing 10% of my code to 80% of my code over the past 6 months, they are responsible for maybe 5% of it. In the rare cases I do cede responsibility, mostly in one-off scripts with easily verifiable outputs, I find that the code they produce is well below my quality standards for long-term maintainable code. And this is with no shortage of hints and guidelines about how I want code to be written.

This doesn’t mean agentic coding tools aren’t useful, they are obviously incredibly useful. But I consider the situation is akin to centaur chess, where for many years after chess engines became stronger than the best human player, the engines could still be beaten by a combination of an engine and human player. Unfortunately for humanity, the window has closed for centaur chess, as outside of contrived positions, the engines are so strong that human input is mostly irrelevant.

But we don’t need to jump the gun with coding yet, we are still very much in the era where a human is adding a lot of value (if not most of it). If you are a “professional vibe coder” that never looks at the code, then you can and should brag that the agent writes and is responsible for 100% of the code that you produce. But for the rest of us who still look at the code, review it, have the agent tweak it, assist the agent in debugging it, we are still responsible for it. So if you want to talk about how much code the agent is writing, just caveat it with how much of that code the agent is ultimately responsible for.