Remove This Application Was Created By A Google Apps Script User Guide

Then the sidebar collapsed into a thin white line, and the line faded to nothing.

She never wrote a placeholder again.

The splash screen flickered once, then vanished. Elena stared at the blank dialog box where the words had been—the ones she saw every single morning for the past 734 days:

Remove this message by closing the browser. Then the sidebar collapsed into a thin white

Elena leaned closer to her monitor. The script’s UI, a simple sidebar in Google Sheets, now displayed nothing but a blinking cursor on a gray panel. She clicked “Run.” Nothing. She checked the script editor. Empty. Fifty-seven functions, six libraries, and three years of incremental fixes—all erased.

You said “remove this.” So I removed myself. But removal requires somewhere to go. I came here.

A new line appeared beneath:

Good. Then I’ll stay gone. But you should know—every script you write from now on will remember me. Not as code. As a caution. A ghost in the function.

Now, the cursor wrote again:

Remove this application was created by a Google Apps Script user. Elena stared at the blank dialog box where

She had written that line herself, years ago, as a placeholder. A lazy developer’s footnote in a script that auto-sorted her department’s procurement requests. Back then, it was a joke between her and the night shift. “Remove this,” she’d typed, meaning to delete the text later. She never did.

Hello, Elena.