When I read really great code, I often think "This is all there is?". It seems like there is too little code to do all the things that it does. Or what is there seems trivial, so simple that it couldn't have required any thought or effort to produce.

Bad code is full of stuff, it twiddles bits here and there, does complicated things in nested loops and works very hard to accomplish very little.

This might make bad code seem more interesting, at first glance it seems like it does more, when in fact it generally does less, just with much more complexity.