"Lines of code" gets a deservedly bad reputation as a productivity or quality metric — a shorter, denser solution isn't automatically worse, and a longer one isn't automatically more thorough. Used as a standalone number, it mostly measures typing, not value delivered.
The breakdown matters more than the total
Splitting a file into code lines, comment lines and blank lines turns a fairly useless total into a couple of genuinely useful signals — a file that's almost entirely comments and blank lines relative to its total size might be over-explained or under-implemented; a large file with almost no comments at all might be a maintenance risk regardless of what the raw line count says.
Use it to spot outliers, not to rank people
The most defensible use of a lines-of-code breakdown is flagging files that look unusual relative to the rest of a codebase — unusually dense, unusually sparse, unusually comment-heavy — as a starting point for a closer look, not as a scorecard.
TeckForge's Lines of Code Counter breaks a pasted file into code, comment and blank line counts with percentages, giving you the actual composition of a file rather than just its length.
