Design By Subtraction

Adding features feels productive. Often, it is not. Reacting to Oskar Dudycz’s article “Addition by Subtraction in Software Design,” I go through his own admission of over-engineering his contract-testing library, Strictland – and why the fix wasn’t adding more options, it was removing them.

This is a commentary on: https://www.architecture-weekly.com/p/addition-by-subtraction-in-software

What we cover:

The “I want it all and I want it now” trap in product and library design
A real case: selectable storage layouts + grouping strategies spiraling into unmanageable permutations
Why “selectable strategy” and “various X strategies” should be warning signs during design
Using a GenAI assistant (Claude) as a sanity-check partner, not just a feature generator
The OODA loop, anti-requirements, and Residuality Theory as tools for figuring out what to cut
Why LLMs make it easier to build the wrong thing faster — and how prototyping can help instead

Two rules worth keeping: the addition of imaginary features subtracts real value, and the subtraction of imaginary features adds real value.