Taking things out is more work than putting things in, and deserves more praise.

March 10, 2026 - 12:49 UTC

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Our organisation had a multi-year project to retire or merge the dozens of little freestanding websites we'd accumulated over the years. We made a cartoon cemetery on a whiteboard with a little paper gravestone for each. Often there'd be a little eulogy at standup for the most recently departed.
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When I was a sub editor (copy editor), my chief sub had a guiding phrase: "If in doubt, take it out."

I think that can be applied to all creative work
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<insert "design is done when there is nothing more to remove" quote here>
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Also, having worked at a 'half-baked MVP' factory, I find that in that environment teams prefer to let things bloat until they have to do a "redesign" that they can show off to leadership as a big (and noble) undertaking.
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Reminds me of this Bill Atkinson story

"When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000."

www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
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"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter"

Attributed to many different famous people and authors, but valid regardless of who said it.
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This is also one of the LLM problems in my field - no, they do not need that laundry list of all the potential policies that may be written. In fact, let me cut that whole section of the document and make this a usable reference document that sends you to a place with a VALIDATED list of policies.
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This is not a shitpost, I'm serious. Adding things is so easy that any computer can do it. Determining whether it improves the whole (and leaving the whole intact when removing the excess) is purely human, because it requires a point of view.
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There's a fun thing at my job where they had a bit of software that did a shitton of stuff, then they said "we should do a b2b version that's simplified" so did that, then they started adding stuff to it, then they said "let's do an ultra-lightweight version" and soon started adding stuff to that
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I just wish they hadn't cut the PC port, I was looking forward to that as someone without a console
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Love seeing those net 20 k lines removal diff

Did a 100 k one this morning of useless JavaScript

Next time I will certainly clap for myself
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It's much easier to pitch adding stuff to stakeholders, too. You can get budgets for features and acclaim for shipping.

Who gets resources and incentives to take things out? And yet, there is broad consensus that shit is too bloated and NEEDS trimming.
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Once you see the elephant, you need to re-narrate its features to the blind men.
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