Bad Code Is Kudzu — and AI Is Making It Grow Faster
Kudzu was introduced to the US to stop soil erosion, then swallowed sidewalks, houses, and trees; the only cure is aggressive, coordinated pruning. Code behaves the same way: features get written on top of features, and deleting them is thankless work that never lands on a promo packet. Vicki Boykis argues that in the AI era, constant deletion is the only defense against drowning in generated slop — and shows how she pruned her own unused hashtag-bubble feature after analytics showed nobody touched it.
But in this new era, we must delete code even harder, because if we don't constantly remove complexity, we are going to drown in generated kudzu slop that overtakes codebases.
- paulgerhardt
I’d argue Kudzu has visibility bias. It grows on sunny roadsides, railway corridors, and disturbed land. Basically all the places where people see it so attribute it to being more pervasive than it is. It's also mostly harmless[2].
Bad code is the inverse. It’s more pervasive than people think it is and builds up precisely in the places that are not disturbed. More like Privet than Kudzu. But that isn’t nearly as catchy.
If you want to dig into the quasi redemption story of why Kudzu isn’t this terrible evil we’ve given it to this was a decent episode of 99%PI at around the 18 minute mark[1].
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/roman-mars-describes-...
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kud...
- jamwise
Bad code as an invasive species is the freshest take I've heard. I have a hard enough time arguing with people that tech debt isn't about bad code, but shifting priorities and requirements. This is going to be a really useful analogy for me going forward, thanks!
- omoikane
Coincidentally, the same plant in Japanese is kuzu (クズ, or 葛), which shares the same pronunciation as the word for trash (屑). So bad code is trash.