Implicit in the notion of completing a project is the certainty that the project manager will change their mind, usually after you have written 95% of it. If you copied & pasted those hundred thousand lines, you will have to change something in at least 100 different places. At that point, you'll give up in despair, proclaim the change impossible, and have the PM cancel the project in a fit of frustration. Thus, not complete.

LOC actually sorta makes sense in this context.

Clever trick to measure the real information content of code using gzip too.