Most weeks, the last thing I do before logging off Friday is open a file and delete something. Not refactor it. Delete it. A dead feature flag, a commented-out block somebody left "just in case" in 2022, a helper function with one caller that could just be inlined. Small stuff, usually. The point isn't the size. The point is the habit. I started doing this maybe six years ago, after a particularly grim quarter on a service nobody fully understood anymore. We had a config loader that supported three formats. Two of them had no live consumers. I know that now because I eventually checked. At the time, everyone assumed someone, somewhere, depended on the YAML path and the INI path, so we kept carrying both through every change. Every bug fix had to be made three times. Every test had to cover three branches. The code wasn't complicated because the problem was complicated. It was complicated because we were afraid. So now I delete things on purpose, on a schedule, when I'm calm and not under deadline pressure.…