It didn’t start out as a cleanup.
I was trying to fix a bug, just a small one, buried deep in a feature no one wanted to touch. The logic felt like an archaeological dig: layers of patches, old comments from devs long gone, fallbacks on fallbacks. Every fix had another fix duct-taped on top.
After a few hours of tracing edge cases and odd branches, I stopped and asked the question I should have asked sooner:
What would happen if this whole thing just… didn’t exist?
So I tested it. Commented out a chunk. The app still ran. Tests still passed. The broken edge case? Gone, because the trigger for it no longer existed. Curious, I kept going. Trimmed a helper function here, a config override there. Whole modules started unraveling. By the end of the day, I had removed over 3,000 lines of code.
Nothing broke.
Actually, things worked better.
Less logic meant fewer branches. Less state. Less cognitive friction. The system felt lighter, like it could breathe again. And weirdly, so could I.
There’s a special kind of joy in deletion, not the reckless, “let’s rewrite everything” kind, but the gentle, intentional kind. The kind where you finally admit that complexity isn’t a sign of maturity, it’s often just a buildup of fear. Fear of breaking things. Fear of letting go. Fear that someone, someday, might need this obscure fallback you once added at 2 a.m.
But clarity doesn’t come from more code. It comes from trust. Trust that the system can do less and still deliver. Trust that your teammates, and your future self, would rather maintain something lean than marvel at your clever abstractions.
Writing code is easy. Deleting it takes courage.
Not because you’re lazy, but because you care. Because you’re listening to what the system wants to be, not what it once was. And you’re choosing to let it be simple again.
I’ve started seeing it like gardening. You don’t just grow, you prune. You shape. You clear space for light to get in.
Sometimes the most powerful act of creation is subtraction.