Jefferson Took a Razor to His Bible
Thomas Jefferson literally cut up the New Testament. Sat there with a blade and physically removed every miracle, every resurrection, every supernatural claim, and pasted what was left — the ethics, the sayings, the actual teaching — into a slim book now called the Jefferson Bible. He kept Jesus the moral philosopher and threw out Jesus the magician. The wisdom was real; the special effects were noise burying it.
I’m not bringing this up to argue theology. I’m bringing it up because cutting is the rarest and most valuable engineering skill, and almost nobody is brave enough to do it.
Every system you inherit is a holy text. The feature someone fought for in 2019. The abstraction a respected ex-colleague was proud of. The config flag nobody dares delete because what if. Codebases accrete reverence. The longer a thing exists the more it gets treated as load-bearing purely because it’s old. So systems get heavier and heavier, not because anyone added value, but because nobody had Jefferson’s nerve — to look at a revered object and say most of this is noise, the signal is small, and I’m keeping only the signal.
The deists did subtraction as a method. Paine, Jefferson, Franklin — the whole move was to strip inherited tradition down to what reason could actually defend and discard the rest no matter how sacred it had gotten. That’s not vandalism. That’s refactoring. Keep the invariant that survives scrutiny, delete the cruft that only survives habit.
The reason this is hard isn’t technical. It’s social. Deleting code feels like destroying value and adding code feels like creating it, even when the truth is reversed. A PR that removes 4,000 lines and a feature flag is one of the most valuable things an engineer can produce, and it’ll get a fraction of the praise of a flashy new service that adds surface area we’ll maintain for a decade. We reward accretion and quietly punish subtraction. Jefferson did the unrewarded thing. He made the book smaller, and that’s what made it sharp.
I keep a Jefferson’s razor on my own work. Looking at something I built a year ago, the question isn’t “what can I add.” It’s “what here is actually carrying weight, and what’s just here because I was once proud of it.” The miracle you have to cut is usually your own old cleverness — the abstraction you were so pleased with you can no longer see it isn’t earning its keep.
There’s a bigger point under the engineering one. Most people’s lives are an un-razored Bible: a thick pile of commitments, subscriptions, half-projects, opinions, and obligations kept because removing them felt like loss. Almost none of it carries the actual teaching. The blade — keep what reason defends, cut what only nostalgia defends — works as well on a calendar as a codebase.
Jefferson thought the truth was small and clean and buried under centuries of decoration. He may have been wrong about the Bible. He was exactly right about almost everything humans build. The signal is small. Have the nerve to cut to it.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.