"200K lines is not 10 times as much as 20K lines - from the mission perspective it's just irrelevant. And yet it's the easiest thing to measure. And so we look for the keys under the lamp post." ~Kent Beck
www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8fBgDCf2Y4&t=2753s
Listening to this I had an AHA moment. When the powers that be made more and more LLM tokens the whole goal, I thought it was quite stupid.
But I realized that for them it made sense, because in their managerial understanding of programming, they believed the output of LLMs is the best they could get for the money.