Charitably I'm guessing it's supposed to be an allusion to the chart with cost per word? Which is measuring an input cost not an output value, so the criticism still doesn't quite make sense, but it's the best I can do...

Maybe it was edited. I count at least 6 instances of the word “code”

"The LLM can write lines of code, sure, but can it be productive?" is, I think, the implied question.

The linked short story is barely 5 paragraphs long. You could have just read it instead of writing an insubstantial remark like this. It’s a fun anecdote about a famous programmer (Bill Atkinson).

Measuring productivity by number of words written per day is as useless of a measure as number of lines of code written per day

gonna tell claude to write all my code in one line

They can already do that. A few months ago I played around with the kaggle python golf competition. Got to top 50 without writing a line of code myself. Modern LLMs can take a piece of code and "golf" it. And modern harnesses (cc / codex / gemini cli) can take a task and run it in a loop if you can give them clear scores (i.e. code length) and test suites outside of their control (i.e. the solution is valid or not).

No idea why you'd want this in a normal job, but the capabilities are here.