My experience with writing is that edits feel much larger while you're making them. But when you take the final version and actually diff it to the original, an

My experience with writing is that edits feel much larger while you're making them. But when you take the final version and actually diff it to the original, and take into account e.g. moving rather than deleting and rewriting text, then the differences are actually quite small. The main exception is when you literally throw everything away and start from scratch. The odds of writing the exact same words twice are basically nil. But I'm not sure this should count as "editing" in the same sense as when I'm doing word-and-line copy editing. I haven't done a rigorous comparison with code, but it would be interesting to take a tool like Moss and see how similar it thinks the code is after <N> revisions of the source.