Vicki Boykis takes one metaphor and follows it all the way. Kudzu was imported to the American South deliberately, as erosion control, and grew until it was taking sidewalks, foundations and trees. The only thing that kills it is aggressive pruning, done by everyone who lives near it at once.
Features are the same. Once a feature is merged, removing it stops being a matter of deleting code:
- Other people start writing code on top of it
- You end up two years deep into an implemented feature no one wants
- “Deleting code is hard, particularly because it’s a thankless task that usually doesn’t go on promo packets”
- But deleting code is silent — nobody notices it happening
The incentive problem is why it doesn’t happen: shipping is visible and honest cleanup is not, which is how codebases accumulate features nobody asked for. Her claim about this moment is that the tradeoff has inverted. Adding code is nearly free now, so the plan to remove it should be written at the same time as the code — and removal has gotten cheaper too.
Her own example is deliberately small. In May she added hashtag bubbles to her blog using ML topic tagging. Rather than defend them, she left the feature in production for a few months to see whether anyone used it. Plausible analytics said the tag pages never cracked the top 30 in three months, so she cut it. Total removal cost: three commits — a changelog entry, moving the search bar back to the header, and deleting the sidebar.
The useful part is that this was an experiment with a decision point built in, not a taste argument. If a feature can be removed in three commits, the bar for keeping it should be evidence that someone uses it.