> Early we should see huge chunky contributions and bursts. Loc means things are being realized.

There is nothing more permanent than a temporary fix that works.

This is a common way for tech debt to build. You're right that strategies like "move fast and break things" is a very useful strategy, but it only really works if it is followed by "cleanup, everybody do your share."

LoC as a measurement is nothing without context. But that context is constantly changing and even dependent on people's coding styles. I like to write my first iteration of even small programs pretty dirty, before I refine. I'll even commit them, but they generally won't show up in a PR because I quickly distill.

I think measuring activity or productivity is an extremely difficult thing to measure. A thing that's extremely easy to fool yourself into believing you're measuring accurately. A first order approximation is going to look fine for a little while, but that is the trap. That is how you fool yourself. In a relatively local timeframe it'll keep looking like it is working, but you have no idea if it is accurate over the timeframes that actually matter. The measure is too simple and adding more first order approximations only makes the measurements worse, not better. Context allows you to progress, but complexity increases exponentially while accuracy may not.