At some point my package.json had thirty-one scripts in it. Some were genuinely useful. A lot were one-off commands I’d written for a specific debugging session eight months earlier and never deleted, because deleting a script feels riskier than it is — what if I need check:images:legacy again someday.
I never needed check:images:legacy again. Going through the list, I could explain what maybe a third of them did from the name alone, and had to actually open and read the rest to remember. A script I can’t identify by name is not saving me any typing; it’s just clutter with extra steps.
The list is five scripts now: dev, build, check, test, lighthouse. Everything else either got folded into one of those five as a flag, or turned out to be genuinely obsolete and got deleted outright. The five that remain map exactly onto the five things I actually do — write, verify, and ship — which is a much better organizing principle than “things I once needed to run.”