A few months ago, I believed one thing:
The more features my software had, the better it would become.
Every new idea sounded amazing.
“Let’s add this.”
“Let’s add another security option.”
“One more button won’t hurt.”
I thought users would see more features and think:
“Wow, this software does everything!”
Instead, I created something far more complicated than it needed to be.
The Illusion of Progress
As developers, adding features feels productive.
Deleting them feels like failure.
But they’re not the same thing.
Every feature introduces:
More code to maintain
More bugs to fix
More edge cases to test
More UI decisions
More opportunities for users to get confused
I slowly realized I wasn’t building a better application.
I was building a more complicated one.
The Advice That Changed My Perspective
One conversation on Dev.to made me stop and rethink my approach.
A Guy named Mustafa ERBAY gave me advice that sounded simple, but completely changed how I look at software.
The message wasn’t:
“Build more.”
It was closer to:
“Build what actually matters.”
That made me question every feature inside my own project.
So I Started Removing Things
Instead of asking:
“What else can I add?”
I started asking:
“What can I remove without reducing the value?”
Surprisingly, that question improved my project more than any new feature ever did.
Some features disappeared completely.
Others were redesigned from scratch.
The result wasn’t a smaller application.
It was a cleaner one.
Good Software Isn’t a Feature Checklist
I’ve learned that users rarely care how many features your software has.
They care about whether it solves their problem.
Ten well-designed features are often better than fifty average ones.
Quality scales.
Complexity does too.
The difference is that only one of them makes users happy.
More Features
≠
More Value
More Clarity
=
Better Software
Building ATLOCK Changed My Thinking
While working on ATLOCK, I kept discovering features that sounded impressive but didn’t genuinely improve the user experience.
Some of them never made it into the final version.
Others were completely redesigned.
Looking back, I’m glad they were.
The application became easier to understand, easier to maintain, and—most importantly—more focused on solving real problems instead of collecting features.
My New Rule
Whenever I think of adding a new feature, I ask myself three questions:
Does this solve a real problem?
Will most users actually use it?
Does it make the software simpler or more complicated?
If I can’t confidently answer those questions…
It probably doesn’t belong.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned as a developer isn’t how to write more code.
It’s knowing when not to write it.
A huge thank you to Mustafa EBRAY for sharing advice that pushed me to rethink my approach to software development.
Sometimes one thoughtful comment changes your engineering mindset more than a hundred tutorials ever could.
What’s one piece of programming advice that completely changed the way you build software?
Try ATLOCK now: https://github.com/Akhouri-Anmol-Kumar/ATLOCK
Download Directly ATLOCK in one click: https://github.com/Akhouri-Anmol-Kumar/ATLOCK/releases/download/v4.0/ATLOCK.zip
“We Build What Others Forgot To Fix”
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