A short highlight from Addy Osmani's 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google.
The best code is the code you never had to write.
We celebrate creation in engineering culture. Nobody gets promoted for deleting code, even though deletion often improves a system more than addition. Every line of code you don’t write is a line you never have to debug, maintain, or explain. Before you build, exhaust the question: “What would happen if we just… didn’t?” Sometimes the answer is “nothing bad,” and that’s your solution.
The problem isn’t that engineers can’t write code or use AI to do so. It’s that we’re so good at writing it that we forget to ask whether we should.