Despite the obvious levity, this is actually serious. It was made by why the lucky stiff, a pretty prominent member of Ruby community, back in the day. This, however, was part of his mysterious burnout manifesto, for lack of better term. He really really bloody needed a break.
“programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.”
Is such a weird complaint. You should aim for your codebase to be as small, simple and readable as possible, while your tests should be a specification that guarantees behavior is consistent between refactors. When you add behavior, you add tests, when you remove a behavior, you delete tests.
The size of either is independent of eachother. Small code bases that provide lots of features should be simple to read, but with a lot of tests.