But the whole point of Chesterton's Fence is that you don't immediately assume it has no purpose, you put a bit of effort into double checking. If you checked a

But the whole point of Chesterton's Fence is that you don't immediately assume it has no purpose, you put a bit of effort into double checking. If you checked and you're confident it's useless and you can explain why to a reviewer, then sure, remove it. Edit to add: thinking about it, I don't think I've ever found code in a legacy codebase that had literally no purpose. The closest might be code that was once used but now isn't referenced anywhere.