Adding is easy. Removing is hard.
Build it and ship it. That’s the default. The assumption is that adding things to the world is good: a new feature, a new tool, a new step in the process. Adding fills a perceived gap. It’s visible and easy to point to.
AI makes it trivially easy to add something—a feature, a workflow, a paragraph. And that ease is a big part of why so many products slide toward enshittification: layer after layer added, nothing ever taken away, until the thing barely works for the people who use it. Adding isn’t the enemy; the problem is that it’s rarely questioned.
Removing is harder. To remove something well, you have to understand why it was there in the first place, and have the judgment to know it’s no longer needed. Things depend on it in ways that aren’t obvious until you pull it out. That often takes more thought than adding ever does. There’s also a quieter fear that we’re throwing away something valuable we might need later.
The skill that’s getting scarcer is subtraction. We rarely ask: What can we take away? What can we make simpler? What problem are we actually solving, and is it even worth solving? These questions matter more now, not less.
Answer those, and the payoff is real: what’s left works better, is easier to explain, and is easier to trust. Simplicity isn’t the absence of effort; it’s the result of it.
Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
What did you remove or simplify today?