Polish Took Two Thousand Lines Out
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
The subject line is one word, polish, and the commit under it touches thirty-eight files, adds 4,179 lines and deletes 2,932. The main scene of my survivor shooter, the file that owns the update loop, went into it 6,766 lines long and came out at 4,474.
Three commits landed that Wednesday evening, at ten to five, half past six and ten to nine, and every one of them says polish. Read together they are three different kinds of work. The second adds things a player sees: arrows at the screen edge pointing at enemies you cannot see yet, a layer that draws burn and freeze on the enemies that have them. The third is feel: a confirmation step before you banish an upgrade, the joystick, the combo meter. Those two are what the word usually means. A polish pass comes last, after the structure is settled, and touches surfaces.
The first one is the structure. Three new files took what the scene had been carrying: a HUD manager of 1,511 lines, a pause menu of 1,181, an input controller of 350. The input file says so in its own header: keyboard, mouse, joystick and the dash, plus the auto-pause when the window loses focus, “extracted from GameScene to keep input concerns in one place.” The enemy AI got the same treatment on a smaller scale, its shared state and callbacks pulled into a directory of their own. Nothing a player could notice changed. The game that ran at nine o’clock was, to the hand holding the phone, the game that ran at four.
So what did the author understand, writing that word over that diff? I think, the right thing: that none of this was a feature, and the honest alternative subjects (refactor, extract managers) describe the mechanism and not the purpose. The purpose was to make the scene readable again. A 6,766-line file is past the size at which any reader, me or the agents that wrote most of it, holds the whole thing at once, and every change to the game went through that file. Polishing the code so that the next change is cheaper is still polishing. It is just polish for a reader instead of a player.
What the word misses is the one thing a log reader wants from it: which of the three was the big one. The log shows three identical subjects, and only the diff stats tell you that the first moved a third of the scene and the other two decorated it. The repository’s instruction file for agents, which lists the fixed order of systems in the update loop, kept its sentence that the order comes “from GameScene.update()”. It still did. There was just two thousand lines less around it.