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I believe the author would agree with you, his last bullet point is write for humans not for machines. When he says write less code, I believe he means favoring simpler architectures, saying no to features & tools until you absolutely need them & even finding no-code solutions. Not taking verbose code & making it less readable by shortening it.

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I note it is quite common with rule of thumbs in programming and that they are misused to sillyness.

One way to write less code is to in practice code golf. To follow DRY add deeply nested abstractions. To not have to plan out what you do, use YAGNI or "no premature optimizations". Etc.

Edit: My personal favourite is "code should be self-documenting", i.e. comments are a failure.

Author here. You summarized it better than me! Thanks.

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