Now that I think of it, if it's paid by lines of code, it perversely incentives people to minimize the lines of code, no? Does it count white space and comments? Can I minify my code before passing it to this, then unminify it?

Many languages can have code written in them minimized down to a single line. I guess they must have a character count number equals a line qualifier somewhere.

But even then, still pushes people to shorten variable names and other kind of minification.

Can you just remove newlines from files? In most languages they're optional.

Count semicolons then.

If it is as smart as some people here think it would probably output: "are you f#$king with me?"

Maybe it’s on recommended line formatting