I’m aware that the difference is that AI-generated code can be read and modified by humans. But that quantity is bad because humans have to understand it to read or modify it.

What’s the point of shorter code if you can’t trust it to do what it’s supposed to?

I’ll take 20 lines of code that do what they should consistently over 1 line that may or may not do the task depending on the direction of the wind.

Although, if we were to ignore all this for a second, you could also make similar estimates with, e.g., gzip: the higher the compression ratio attained, the more "verbose"/"fluffy" the code is.

Fun tangent: there are a lot of researchers who believe that compression and intelligence are equivalent or at least very tightly linked.

I'm not sure though. If it's copied a bunch of times, and it actually doesn't matter because each usecase of the copying is linearly independent, does it matter that it was copied?

Over time, you'd still see copies being changed by themselves show up as increased entropy

In fact it's the one thing they are explicitly designed to do, the rest is more or less a side-effect.

WinRAR can do that for you quite effectively.

I understand more code as being more edge cases

I can also suggest alternatives, like using existing library functions for things that might have been coded manually.

fun story: today I had an LLM write me a non-trivial perl one-liner. It tried to be verbose but I insisted and it gave me one tight line.