> It's hard to say if this code is structurally better or worse than before, but it's certainly voluminous and as far as leadership could ever tell, with their flawed metrics, that is all that matters.

Hah. I've been working with ChatGPT-5.6 Sol and a lot of guidance to port a particular geometry from 2800 lines of Python-scripted Rhino3D (basically a custom parametric CAD kernel in there, plus use of it) to Python-scripted OCCT/FreeCAD (an existing CAD kernel) and it's up to 36,000 lines and only about half way there. And I've been setting goals and targets for duplication minimization, code size reduction, etc. The results are fine for my purposes, but if I put a positive value on "voluminous" I'd be super impressed; with my actual negative value assignment on lines of code, this is more "absolute crap but still useful to me."

I think "absolute crap but still useful to me" is a pretty high value and not worth neglecting, but I'm definitely scared by leadership who sees the toilet overflowng and assumes that means that value has been maximized.

> I think "absolute crap but still useful to me" is a pretty high value and not worth neglecting

If I extrapolate this example to my professional life, this code now manages millions of dollars, a single mistake can wipe it all out, it has to be maintained by 5 other engineers and understood by 5 other domain experts.