For a few months, every code review I did ended the same way: with a deletion.
Not because the code was bad. It compiled, it had tests, it had sailed through review once already. But again and again the real fix was to remove the thing entirely — the wrapper function, the defensive regex, the helper that guarded a state my own schema could never produce. And here's what kept surprising me: the system got stronger every time. Races disappeared because there was nothing left to race. Whole classes of bugs became unrepresentable. Semantics that had been smeared across five functions became visible in one place.
At some point I stopped and asked the question properly.
What is the best code?
The code that does not exist.
