I think at work I am just barely in the category of I've removed more code than I have added. Over many, many bugs and long meetings I've sort of arrived at the conclusion that in most cases, the best code (excluding comments) is the code that doesn't have to exist [0]. It occurred to me at work today while refactoring some change that even in this LLM-driven world, I can still optimize for that for some additional challenge and satisfaction.

The root of this challenge comes from more text aka more code ~= more tokens, so these firms have little incentive to optimize for that mindset. Sure, they might have more optimized individual responses - but the end result is still giving people what they want: more features, more documentation, nice, long, verbose and well-formatted Jira comments, of sometimes questionable but sometimes undeniably impressive quality. The band marches on, and when your codebase outgrows the constraints of the tried-and-true tools, you can just invent your own. With documentation and an MCP or two, or ten -- to also pull into your context window.

[0] I work on an operating system, so a suggested retort is to say this is me pushing responsibility and logic to the people higher up on the stack ;-)