GoKawiilThu, Jun 4, 2026
The most valueble code in my repo, is the code I didn't write.
Have you ever thought back to when you were kind of excited about something - eg. of having more tests for some particular part of your stack, or rewriting legacy website from "legacy old thing" to "shiny new thing"? Or deploying your services on AWS intead of GCP?
Or maybe it was a feature you wanted to build - such as a task management thing on top of your CRM, or some slick way of handling images in your infra?
Is your team's backlog filled with these things? I know mine is. Those are ideas and tasks that the business, your boss, your team, or yourself never prioritized. You thought to yourself: I'll get to it later.
The ideas that are actually worth prioritizing, you work on. Or you hire people to work on. They get done because they are deemed important enough.
4 years later it's clear that those backlog features would not have helped at all. It is a good thing they never got built. They're either irrelevent today or you already pivoted your product to something completely different.
They'd simply be legacy cruft you either need to support or remove.
I think about those things all the time. All the things I never built.
Every time you don't build something, you are accelerating your team, the product and you are prioritizing what is important at any given moment. Not building is a really powerful feature. Picking is a product and development strategy.
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