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You are absolutely right.

AI is used to generate new code, not to reduce its size through rewrite [1].

[1] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

The code is always a burden, a legacy. To support it, one need to look after it, take care of it, bear it's weight.

I have 35+ years of experience on my shoulders. I always celebrate when I can reduce code - and, recently, I do that more and more often, being a support person for a large code base with a 20+ years of history.

PS You were answering a comment that brags about migrating multithousand LOC code bases from language to the other. Recently I had to review a file that is more than (metric) megabyte (10^6 bytes) and more than 32 thousands LOC in size. I need to find a way to apply a fix for a problem triggered by single statement in several thousands (more that 1M of LOCs) of test cases.




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