&gt; &gt; ... I&#x27;ve removed a whole bunch of code from my own library<p>&gt; You removed a bunch of code you understood, and added a bunch more code you don&#x27;t understand, along with whatever technical debt, edge cases, and performance issues which are lingering in that library.<p>Not all code you&#x27;ve written is good code. Hell, not all code you&#x27;ve written you actually understand. Libraries and dependencies make sense in many cases. Don&#x27;t write yet another JSON parsing library unless you <i>really</i> need to.<p>&gt; Adding a library is never removing code from your project, it&#x27;s adding code you don&#x27;t yet understand to your project. It can still be a net win, but it&#x27;s not less code for you to maintain.<p>It&#x27;s referencing code that you don&#x27;t maintain. If the maintainer is bad, use a different library.