[he11ow]

Don't know about "ideal" but YC have a video where Michael Siebel talks about the dev cycle they had at Twitch. Before they applied it, he says, they wrote lots of redundant code and also get stuck on stuff that didn't matter.

Eventually, what they did was set up two-week dev cycles. Before each, they'd write down suggestions for features/WIP and stick everything on the board. They would also estimate if a feature was large (one week of work or over), medium (2-3 days) or small (up to a day). Then, they'd pick the most urgent things off that list, and work only on them. Two weeks later, same thing. But you don't keep a list of the ideas, the other things don't go into a queue.

I applied this for a product I was building last year, and it definitely helped build faster.

Not sure about measuring things in LOC or commits.