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In the past ten days, I haven't written a single line of code for tarsnap. And I'm proud of it. There has been a trend lately, particularly where internet startups are concerned, to measure success by the number of lines of code written. People talk about the all-important "first-mover advantage" and about things moving at "internet speed", while Paul Graham -- co-founder of Viaweb and of the Y Combinator startup incubator -- lists "Release Early" as #1 on his list of lessons for startups to learn. In a recent article about Y Combinator, Paul Graham pointed to the fact that two people had written 40,000 lines of code in three months as a sign that they were doing something right; he went on to point out that "you never see that in a big company". To me this number is, if anything, a sign that things are going horribly wrong: