Story
Lines of Code Are Back (and It's Worse Than Before)
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Overview
Lines of code has resurfaced as a metric in the software industry, despite longstanding criticism of its effectiveness. Dijkstra previously condemned it as a costly measure that promotes poor coding practices.
Summary from thepragmaticcto.com.
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thepragmaticcto.com
Lines of Code Are Back (and It's Worse Than Before)
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Community reactions
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Hacker News · thepragmaticcto.com
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Historical count: 5 · 5 saved in sample · Historical sample
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Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-02-12.
- Praise: Lines of code can serve as a useful metric for estimating project complexity, helping developers gauge the scale of their work effectively.
- Praise: Reframing lines of code as a measure of efficiency, such as achieving significant functionality in fewer lines, highlights impressive coding skills and can inspire better practices.
- Concern: AI-generated code often tends to be verbose and bloated, indicating a need for refinement and suggesting that initial outputs may lack quality.
- Concern: The reliance on lines of code as a measure of productivity can be misleading, as it does not account for the quality or efficiency of the code produced.