We can glean a lot of information about code from visual cues like number of lines in the file, the size of the blocks of text, number of blocks, and the consistency and amount of indentation.

• Bigger files — typically bad
• Bigger blocks of text — typically bad
• Lots of blocks of text — typically bad
• Lots of indentation — typically bad
• Inconsistent indentation — typically bad

Now, I don’t think that if any of the above are present, it is a metaphysical certainty that code is bad. And, just because some code does not have any of the above, I don’t think it means it must be good.

I do think they are good predictors. In my experience, the vast majority of the time if I see something that has all of the issues listed above, it is going to be difficult to work with. Conversely, if it is going to be easy to work with, it will typically have none of the aforementioned issues.