Build Features That Delete

September 19, 2025

A piece of software becomes less useful the more cluttered it gets, yet most products focus on ease of creating resources, rather than archiving or deleting them.

I explored this concept with my startup Fabric. We had a feature called Issue Rooms. On an issue, you could click to spin up a dedicated Slack channel, and Fabric automatically archived the channel when the issue closed.

A few customers really loved this feature, to the point of asking for source code when we shut down. They liked that we organized, and later archived, a bunch of messages for them.

But people have a hard time deleting things themselves.

It's emotionally difficult to clean out your closet. When you put something in the donation pile, it's easy to think of a future scenario where you might need that thing. And then you'd feel sad.

The price of clutter is cognitive load, and not being able to find the thing you need. There's more noise, and less signal.

Software should help people clear the clutter.

When you're building a software product, it feels risky to delete things the user has created. The cost of getting it wrong is high.

But the reward is clean software. Software that feels like laying on your back in a wide open field.