Eva Ferreira

I've been deleting a lot of code lately and I cannot tell you how good it feels. I cleared out about 400 stale translation keys — the kind that accumulate over years and that nobody dares touch, because who still knows what references them? The agent knows; it checks every reference in seconds, so the sweep I'd always filed under "someday" turned into an afternoon. And Eugene and Jeff finally pulled out Bootstrap (BOOTSTRAP! the framework we've been trying to get rid of for years!) — thank you both, truly. I re-ran our UI library market share report afterward and that's when the impact really landed: Bootstrap is finally gone.

What surprised me is how the agents change the math. Migrating class components to function components with hooks, ripping out an old framework, pruning dead i18n — these were always "we should do this eventually" jobs that lost every prioritization fight. The cost of removing code and cleaning up our codebases dropped enough that now we just... do it. I keep catching myself opening diffs hoping they're mostly red.

I built a skill that audits the UI codebase for Design System consistency and I've been running it monthly — checking for hardcoded hex colors instead of our color tokens, raw elements where we have accessible components, patterns that drift from our guidelines. The first few rounds were genuinely useful. Nothing dramatic — but the kind of quiet drift that accumulates when nobody's watching. A hardcoded color here, a custom dropdown where we have a component for that. Each time the audit surfaces something, I fix it and then update our coding guidelines so the pattern doesn't come back. That second part surprised me — the guidelines are getting sharper each month because the audit keeps finding the gaps. (I VOLUNTARILY RUN DESIGN SYSTEM AUDITS MONTHLY. I KNOW.)