I removed 10 AI features and kept 2
I deleted 10 AI features from my social scheduling tool and kept 2. The OpenAI service in my codebase now exposes exactly one method: complete().
I am a solo founder. PostSider started as a fork of Postiz, and the fork arrived with an AI stack I never chose. Every one of those features was code I would have to read, patch, secure and pay for.
So I cut them.
What went
Here is the full list I pulled out of the codebase:
A LangGraph agent
The agent bridge that fed it
The inherited MCP and chat server, plus its whole tool set and its settings page
A copilot
Autopost
AI image generation
AI video generation
AI slides generation
Voice
SSO into a third party agent media service
Three external AI vendors went with them: fal, veo3, heygen. That is three sets of API keys, three billing relationships and three failure modes I no longer own.
What stayed
Two things.
Post Checker. It reviews a draft before it goes out.
Caption rewrite. It rewrites a caption you already wrote.
Both run through one method on one service. If the platform key is missing, an org plugs in its own key and the endpoints return a 409 until it does. That is the entire AI surface of the product.
Deleting a feature is not deleting a file
This is the part I underestimated.
Ripping out the agent left orphans everywhere. Three groups of Prisma models with nothing pointing at them (AutoPost, AgentToken, the mastra_* tables), dead enum values, and a column on the Organization model for a mode that no longer existed. All of it had to come out in its own migration.
I did the same pass on social providers and removed 8 of them entirely: gmail, reddit, kick, rumble, vk, bear-blog, mewe, skool. Not just the provider files. The DTOs, the settings union, the manager registration, the connector catalog, the onboarding lists, the icons, and every keyed map that assumed those 8 keys existed.
A feature is a file, a database table, an enum, a settings page, an icon, five map entries and a line in someone's onboarding flow. Budget for all of it.
The part where I put AI back
I am not anti-AI. I rebuilt one piece from scratch.
The new MCP server wraps my public API so agents can drive the product from outside. It has 2 dependencies: the MCP SDK and zod. It ships with 27 tests. It shares nothing with the inherited agent stack I deleted.
That is the distinction I care about. The old MCP was a chat product bolted into my app. The new one is a thin door onto an API that already worked. One of those is a feature I have to maintain forever. The other is 400 lines that break loudly when the API changes.
What I would tell you before you inherit a codebase
Inherited features are not free features. They read as free because they already work. They bill you in security review, in dependency upgrades, in every migration you write around tables you do not use.
Count vendors, not features. Ten AI features looked like a rich product. Three vendor integrations looked like what it actually was: three more things that could break my publish path on a Tuesday.
A stripped feature leaves a shadow. Search the schema, the enums and the keyed maps, not just the folder you deleted.
Narrow beats impressive when you are one person. My product schedules posts to social platforms. Every hour I spent on a voice feature was an hour not spent on the queue, the approval flow or the per-platform preview that people actually asked about.
PostSider is in private beta right now, running on a VPS with live publishing verified end to end. Happy to share what the strip looked like commit by commit if that is useful to anyone doing the same thing to a fork.
The thing I keep thinking about: I was afraid the product would look thin without the AI features. It looks sharper. The pitch got shorter and I stopped explaining features I did not believe in.
What did you delete from your product that you expected to miss, and then never thought about again?
