Rebuilding from zero is faster than debugging
Shareful.ai had repos for a Mac app, iOS app, Chrome and Safari extensions, a frontend, and a monolith database. Weeks of work. I deleted it all and rebuilt from scratch in one night with Claude Code Max 20x. Live before morning.
Based on the shareful.ai rebuild in February 2026.
Weeks of work, deleted in a night
Shareful.ai was a Mac app, an iOS app, Chrome and Safari extensions, a frontend, and a monolith database. Weeks of work, and it had got tangled enough that I'd stopped being able to move in it. So I deleted all of it and started again from an empty folder. One night, Claude Code Max 20x. Live before morning.
The second version was better in every way, and not because I got smarter at 2am. The first time I was guessing at what the product needed. The second time I knew. The old code carried every assumption I'd made. The new code carried only what I'd learned. The first build wasn't wasted. It was research.
Deletion is editing
Deleting a codebase used to mean losing weeks, so you held on and debugged. Now it means losing hours. When building is fast, deleting is just editing. Hold onto broken code out of sunk cost and you're the one being irrational.