[rightbyte]

I note it is quite common with rule of thumbs in programming and that they are misused to sillyness.

One way to write less code is to in practice code golf. To follow DRY add deeply nested abstractions. To not have to plan out what you do, use YAGNI or "no premature optimizations". Etc.

Edit: My personal favourite is "code should be self-documenting", i.e. comments are a failure.