[Ace17]

> I see blog posts all the time about how a programmer's job is more thinking than writing code and/or writing good programs is also about taking out just as much code as you put in.

It becomes a lot more debatable when you're modifying existing code (rather than writing new code).

There are actually lots of cases when the thinking takes a small fraction of the typing, e.g "this block should be extracted as a separate method", "this class needs to be renamed", "this interface should be split" ... or, even more obvious "this file needs to be properly indented".

We have automatic tools for some of these operations, precisely because doing them manually might spend a ridiculous amount of programming time.