"Don't rewrite everything — but you can re-architect aggressively by deleting unnecessary cruft and keeping the core. The right unit isn't 'the system,' it's the parts of the system that no longer pull their weight."
Evidence from the Archive
Community Notes / X
After Twitter's layoffs, the Community Notes team audited the system and deleted parts whose maintenance cost exceeded their contribution — a partial, deletion-driven re-architecture that worked
Jay Baxter argues the right unit isn't 'the system' but the components that no longer pull their weight — small teams are forced into this discipline that large teams rarely do
Baxter holds the most interesting middle position in this debate because he lived through the Elon-era X re-architecture and is willing to say, carefully, that a version of it actually worked. His framing starts from a specific pathology: engineers add small incremental A/B-test wins that look good in a one-month experiment but carry long-term maintenance costs that compound over years.
After Twitter's large layoffs, the Community Notes team was forced into an audit they would never have done voluntarily — walking through the system, identifying parts whose maintenance burden exceeded their contribution, and deleting them. He explicitly corrects Lenny's framing: this is not the same as a greenfield rewrite. The interesting move is in the middle: aggressive deletion of accumulated cruft while preserving the parts of the system that still earn their keep.
In Jay's own words: "You don't have to rewrite everything from scratch. Some things are good, I guess, to rewrite. But just even deleting the unnecessary cruft and keeping the rest of the core system, that's awesome." (Correcting Lenny's framing that Elon 'threw away the whole thing' — the actual intervention was selective deletion plus partial rewrite.)