I sort of think of the absolute value of lines changed as a pulse.

You can do -100. You can do 100. You can net zero from 100 adds and 100 subtracts (abs=200). But it’s something. If you have long stretches of zero that’s not good.

The true big brained programmer sat in a meeting and prevented a team of 25 people from wasting 6 months.

Sure. That’s super valuable.

But I hope they have something productive to show for the other 20 odd days that month they collected their paycheque for…

At a previous job I had a few months where I managed approximately minus‐1 instruction per week — and it was the best money the company ever spent. Hard constraints are hard.

Sure. But a code review of their checkins will reveal their productivity pretty quick. Any one claiming 10x (or even 0.75x) productivity would want some very good supporting evidence if they have zero activity in the source control for a month. You want some great specification documents or API documentation or platform architecture diagrams or something…

In case this wasn't clear, when I say "no code" I mean no commits, nothing they can point to as evidence of doing any work. Afaic, commits removing code count for at least as much as those adding code. And if they've spent the past month adding documentation to the intranet wiki or something like that, there should be logs they can show to prove it.