Many years ago I was working on a small team when we were approached by a would-be investor.

“We’re interested in buying your company. How many lines of code are in your software project?”

We did a quick calculation, and responded with something like “Eh, about 30,000. Maybe. Not sure. Why?”

”Oh, never mind. We only invest in projects with 1 million lines of code or more.”

From that day on the running joke became that every time one of us deleted some dead code, or refactored some code to be shorter, our commit message would say Reduced value by N lines.

How much value does your code provide? And how closely is that value related to the amount of code?

True value is measured by utility, not bulk.