Bad code is kudzu

Cultivation of the Vines, Henri Martin Kudzu is a plant that was once introduced from East Asia to the eastern United States as a way to combat soil erosion. But, kudzu, once introduced, grows aggressively and can overtake sidewalks, houses, foundations, and even trees. The only way to kill kudzu is to prune it aggressively, as a concentrated strategy enacted together by all the people who live near where the kudzu grows. You know where I’m going with this. An app feature, once added to a codebase, can be extremely hard to remove. Even simple features become very sticky because not only do you have to remove the code, but what’s worse is that people start writing code on top of your code, and before you know it, you are 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, which is why we end up shipping hundreds of thousands of lines of sparkle emoji magic wand AI features,…