With the rise of agentic coding, this has become a sign of quality for me in my own PRs and reviews: New features implemented in less than a thousand lines of productive code.
When I'm working on code that was heavily vibecoded, most of my PRs are reducing LoC by a couple hundreds of lines while fixing bugs or implementing a new feature.
My job kind of feels like being a garbage man, luckily my current employer appreciates it. Personally I think the current style of vibecoding only kinda works, because models are getting better fast enough to keep the shitpile from overflowing completely. Betting on the harnesses + models getting good enough to clean up after themselves is a bet, and I don't like gambling, but even I admit the odds don't seem to be bad.
"""
Steve Ballmer
In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing.
"""
So many times in my career I have seen a problem that could be handled with two lines of code and a table lookup being handled with 40 lines of code and a switch statement. So the guy writing the 40 lines of codes switch statement would get paid 20 times more money!
When I'm working on code that was heavily vibecoded, most of my PRs are reducing LoC by a couple hundreds of lines while fixing bugs or implementing a new feature.
My job kind of feels like being a garbage man, luckily my current employer appreciates it. Personally I think the current style of vibecoding only kinda works, because models are getting better fast enough to keep the shitpile from overflowing completely. Betting on the harnesses + models getting good enough to clean up after themselves is a bet, and I don't like gambling, but even I admit the odds don't seem to be bad.