Bad Code Is Kudzu

The article argues that in modern software and AI-era development, the real risk to enterprise systems is not just feature sprawl, but the long-term operational drag of code and capabilities that are easy to add and hard to remove. For CIOs and technology leaders, the strategic implication is that IT organizations must treat feature retirement, pruning, and complexity reduction as first-class engineering disciplines to avoid accumulating maintainability debt, slowing delivery, and increasing platform risk.