tl;dr: The only way to limit the cost of solving a problem is to limit the LOC count allowed to the developers. This ignores real world issues: - It is utterl

tl;dr: The only way to limit the cost of solving a problem is to limit the LOC count allowed to the developers. This ignores real world issues: - It is utterly trivial to work around this one, since every popular language lets you write an abritrary amount of code in a single line. In fact, your entire application could be a single line of code, easy! - When you enforce KPIs, the only people who will stay are the ones who agree with the KPI (code golfers) or know how to work around it (see above). To extend this idea to its logical conclusion and work around both the issues above, why not limit the number of characters the developers can use? Because every single name in the application will be a single character, making maintenance a nightmare. Let's continue the above list for fun: - Automated tests are code, so they would limit the budget of production code even further. - Infrastructure as code is out the window, for the same reason. This is an awful idea.