I actually like LOC as a metric. Base on the truism that every line of code has a potential bug, even if the line is cruft, then the length of the codebase is

I actually like LOC as a metric. Base on the truism that every line of code has a potential bug, even if the line is cruft, then the length of the codebase is proportional to the potential bugs. It's a simplification, obviously, but LOC is useful in this respect. The main problem with LOC IMHO is people try and use it for the wrong purpose.