DeadWeight is a developer tool built to solve a common but often overlooked problem: unused dependencies, dead files, and leftover code that silently increase project size, complexity, and maintenance cost.

The idea started with a simple question: What if developers could safely remove project deadweight instead of simply being told what is unused?

We built DeadWeight as a VS Code extension that analyzes the project, detects unused packages and files, calculates a safety score, and helps developers remove them without accidentally breaking the application.

During development, we explored dependency analysis, project graphs, unused-package detection, pre-deletion validation, rollback mechanisms, and planted traps to test whether the tool could distinguish safe deletions from risky ones.

The result is a developer-focused cleanup tool that makes removing dead code and dependencies safer, smarter, and more explainable.