See also

-2000 lines of code

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387179

This is actually one thing I have found LLMs surprisingly useful for.

I give them a code base which has one or two orders of magnitude of bloat, and ask them to strip it away iteratively. What I'm left with usually does the same thing.

At this point the code base becomes small enough to navigate and study. Then I use it for reference and build my own solution.