I'm planning an article at the moment in defense of lines of code. Saying "lines of code are a bad measurement" is too easy! It's about time someone presented an opposing argument.

In my specific case, lines of code for my published open source projects is a metric that I trust, because I have high standards for those. I have plenty of other projects where I'll accept poor quality, unreviewed code (almost all of https://github.com/simonw/tools for example), but Datasette, sqlite-utils and LLM are not that.

Of course, that's only useful for me personally and for people who trust me to stick to my own self-declared high standards!

> Lines of code are akshually a good metric now, because that's the only metric LLMs can optimize and I really, really, really love LLMs, they're the bee's knees.

Really now?

> Saying "lines of code are a bad measurement" is too easy! It's about time someone presented an opposing argument.

Maybe because there is none.

One of the main quality of good codebase is simplicity. Which is about how easy for someone else to understand the code. It’s hard to define what simplicity looks like, so the best bet is to avoid the other side, making the code too complex.

And you can make the code complex by shortening variable name, doing code golfing with quicks of the platforms, so smaller LoC. You can also go the other way and increase the LoC by adding unneeded abstractions, repeating slices of code,… There’s a window where the LoC is perfect to attain simplicity, but that amount is an effect of striving for simplicity, not a cause of it. And it’s variable for every problem.

So you got something where the correct value is a different for each case. And trying to manipulate it artificially often results in complex code. And you want to say that is a good metric for productivity?

And in the cases of your projects, there are a lot more info could share that are interesting, like the amount of issues (reported or found by you) that are tied to implementation bugs (coding, libraries API breakage,…) or design issues (requirements conflicts,…), documentation improvement,… Anything that is tied to the actual usefulness of the projects, and not fumbling around with code.