> Sometimes there’s 10 LOC which huge value, but if over the long term the most productive devs at a company are only shipping on the order of 100 LOC/week, progress is gonna be really slow.
To me this belief is a big red flag. The most productive developers I've worked with have all been among those on the team with the lowest LOC count. Writing lots of code is easy: Ignore good practices, don't think through how to generalize components, and reducing boilerplate, and in the process of doing so create a codebase where getting anything done without high LOC changes becomes progressively harder.
In my last job, I spent many weeks on a component that ended up at ~2KLOC. In the same time period, we had several people writing thousands of lines of code each of views and controllers for a number of database tables.
Once my component was done, it dynamically synthesized the starting point for 10x the number of tables let us cut weeks of developer time off the work involved for each model where we now just had to fill in some config and write the occasional custom component to make things nicer. It also let me spend the following week deleting many thousands of LOC of code the rest of the team had written that had been rendered entirely redundant, so my average LOC produced for that period was net negative and cut months off our delivery timeline.
Sustained high LOC count is to me a warning sign. If the code is easy enough to write that you can churn it out at high tempo, odds are there are patterns that can be generalised and wrapped up in higher-leverage components that you're ignoring.
