The cheapest feature is the one you don't build
Three signals that say 'do not write this code' — and what they saved us in a single day.
Digital sobriety is almost always framed as an optimisation problem: lighter images, better caching, a cleaner region. All true, and all marginal. The real waste sits elsewhere, and nobody measures it: code written for nothing. A migration to redo, a tool bought then dropped, a feature shipped that nobody opens. Which leaves the question we had never put into words: how do you decide not to build something?
The report gives the three signals we settled on, and what each one saved over one ordinary working day: a broken feature nobody complained about — information about the feature, not about the bug; 1,400 translations we did not write because no reader could reach them; and a monitoring gap that turned out to be a rehearsal gap, not a tooling gap.
It also says what those signals do not mean. “Nobody needs it” is the perfect excuse for doing nothing, and a rule that can only say no has stopped being a rule. Two guardrails keep it honest — including this one: an unused feature is sometimes badly exposed rather than useless.