The first thing I do when I open a file I haven't touched in weeks is delete. Not refactor. Not fix. Delete. Three lines that explained themselves — gone. A comment from the person I was last Tuesday, embarrassing — gone. A function I added "just in case" that nothing ever called — gone. The file gets shorter. Something inside me gets quieter. I think about this with paintings too. Every painter I respect talks about the moment the painting was finished, and they painted over it anyway. The fox in the corner that distracted from the field. The figure that wanted too much attention. The color that was clever instead of true. Code has a vanishing point most people don't see. You can keep adding forever — handlers, fallbacks, abstractions, types — and the program keeps running. Painting tells you "stop" with a kind of dread; the surface refuses one more mark. Code lets you be wrong for years. The repo grows. The tests still pass. The fox stays in the corner. So I delete.…