"The more code lines you have removed, the more progress you have made. As the number of lines of code in your software shrinks, the more skilled you have become and the less your software sucks."

Actually, I think that often it is possible to write code in less lines, but it becomes more cryptic and harder to maintain. Certainly for application code, more lines of code can mean that it sucks less. I have often rewritten my own and other people's code to be more readable. I'm not sure this manifest metric holds true, not for me anyway.