Bad Code Is Kudzu — and AI Is Making It Grow Faster
Kudzu was introduced to the US to stop soil erosion, then swallowed sidewalks, houses, and trees; the only cure is aggressive, coordinated pruning. Code behaves the same way: features get written on top of features, and deleting them is thankless work that never lands on a promo packet. Vicki Boykis argues that in the AI era, constant deletion is the only defense against drowning in generated slop — and shows how she pruned her own unused hashtag-bubble feature after analytics showed nobody touched it.
But in this new era, we must delete code even harder, because if we don't constantly remove complexity, we are going to drown in generated kudzu slop that overtakes codebases.