Conversely: "The things you own, end up owning you".
A line of code is something you own. It makes you obligated to either maintain it or let it go. The only truly free development is greenfield development, where you can write whatever you want. And now you've got code you own, and you're in its debt.
So yeah, we can all live wonderfully free lives by writing no code, but that does tend to up our other debts, i.e. student loans, mortgages, etc.
Good code is not more code or less code but code that does what the customer actually wants it to do. The better we understand the customer's needs, the more we can write just the correct code. We can't always do that; often the customer themselves doesn't know what they need.
Regardless, the way out of this conundrum is to stop counting code, technical debt, or other ways of trying to make the human problem into a computer problem. The real problems are always out there, not in our repositories.
A line of code is something you own. It makes you obligated to either maintain it or let it go. The only truly free development is greenfield development, where you can write whatever you want. And now you've got code you own, and you're in its debt.
So yeah, we can all live wonderfully free lives by writing no code, but that does tend to up our other debts, i.e. student loans, mortgages, etc.
Good code is not more code or less code but code that does what the customer actually wants it to do. The better we understand the customer's needs, the more we can write just the correct code. We can't always do that; often the customer themselves doesn't know what they need.
Regardless, the way out of this conundrum is to stop counting code, technical debt, or other ways of trying to make the human problem into a computer problem. The real problems are always out there, not in our repositories.