GoKawiilEssay Compares Software Feature Bloat to Invasive Kudzu Vine
A software commentary piece argues that app features, once shipped, behave like kudzu — an invasive plant that spreads uncontrollably and is nearly impossible to remove. The author cites a personal example: adding AI-driven hashtag bubbles to a blog in May, then discovering months later through Plausible analytics that the feature never cracked the top 30 visited pages, making it not worth maintaining.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
As AI coding tools make it trivially easy to add new features, codebases risk accumulating unused complexity faster than teams can prune it. The piece highlights an overlooked engineering discipline — deletion — that lacks career incentives despite being essential to preventing long-term software rot.
- Unused code features tend to persist and compound complexity over time, like an invasive plant.
- AI tools accelerate feature creation, making deliberate deletion strategies more important than ever.
- Analytics tools like Plausible can reveal when a shipped feature simply isn't worth the maintenance cost.
Source: vickiboykis.com, 2026-09-10
Published there as: “Bad Code Is Kudzu”
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