The Software Is Finished

I wrote¹ a Strava replacement in a morning.

Once I shipped and tested the completed build, I found myself wanting to do more. Bringing a forklift to the gym doesn’t make you stronger, but holy crap does it get those weights moved, and that has an exciting energy of its own.

But there’s nothing more to do. Every additional line of code would reduce the utility of the software².

I wonder if that contributes to code bloat, the update treadmill, and enshittification. Coders want to code, because it’s fun and because it means we stay on payroll.

But, even if the additional LOC cost almost nothing, they’re still net negative, because they deliver negative value.

The software is perfect³. Ship it and move on.

---

Footnotes

1. Well, prompted. But the tools don’t matter here. ↩

2. Every feature the software implements that the user doesn’t need makes it less useful to that user. ↩

3. In the Latin sense of “finished”. ↩