Deleting things will make the app you want.

We're all too precious. Code is moving faster than ever and we're deleting less stuff than ever. This is a bad approach.

2025-01-23

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I’m really enthusiastic about making things. The standard for things we make however is too low. There was a moment online when just doing anything meant you’d find customers or attention. That moment is over. It’s actually been over for a while. Maybe now that someone with a big following said AI killing SEO you’re ready to hear that the minimum isn’t enough.

The reality is that everything we make the first time sucks. Heck, most things we make 15 or 20 times suck. Things we love however, they’re labored over. Striving to labor more is a good thing. I’m not a writer. I’ve been working at it a little bit but not in a very methodical way. As a result I won’t get much better. If I picked an approach and worked at it I think I could improve.

People can improve at almost anything. That’s one of my favorite things. If you prioritize a goal and work at it time and compounding just work.

This post is about deleting things though.

You suck. Your app sucks. Your company, side project, cli-tool, idea… sucks. They’re terrible. They’re supposed to be. You almost surely built the wrong thing and added the wrong features. You handled a loading state or an error incorrectly. You picked a lazy path because it didn’t provide value and so the user experience is worse.

Everyone knows this. They see the thing they built as a pile of tradeoffs. When the miraculous happens (like where I work right now) and the app gets a ton of traction, all of a sudden you have to just hang on for dear life.