Before you remove something that seems pointless, find out why it was put there. The reason may still matter, and you'll only see it once it's gone.
What is chesterton's fence? Read the full idea →A new manager scraps a sign-off as bureaucracy, then learns it was the only check stopping costly errors.
That weird if-statement looks redundant until you remove it and a rare edge case starts crashing in production.
The custom seems silly until you discover it once prevented a real harm everyone has since forgotten.
Cutting a rule that 'does nothing' can revive the exact problem it was quietly preventing.
Chesterton's original: don't tear down a fence until you understand why someone bothered to build it.
That's just how memory works. Lock chesterton's fence in with a 5-minute active-recall session — spaced repetition, no signup.
Try this idea free →One tap adds it to your review queue — we bring it back right before you'd forget.