Adding infrastructure feels like progress. You open a PR, something new exists, the diagram gets another box. Removing infrastructure feels like admitting a mistake. The box disappears, and someone might ask why it was there in the first place.
That asymmetry quietly shapes a lot of engineering decisions. Caches get added and almost never questioned again. Queues, feature flags, extra services, a replica here, a sidecar there. Every one made sense the day it shipped. Together they become the thing nobody wants to touch.
The most useful question I hear from strong engineers is the opposite of adding. It sounds like: "What if we just didn't cache this?" Or: "What breaks if we delete this service entirely?" Most of the time the honest answer is "less than you'd think."
Deletion is undervalued work. It rarely gets a demo. It doesn't show up as a shiny new capability. But removing a thing you no longer need lowers the number of ways the system can fail, and that compounds for years.
What's the last piece of infrastructure your team removed on purpose?
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