Hi
@MGrow! Well, this must be done slightly and intelligently. Indeed, each leaf you pluck willl generate a hormonal reaction, as the plant will try to recover from this loss, and she will take hours (or days) to adapt to its new shape and grow vigorously again. That being said, it can be very useful if some leaves are creating shades onto lower parts that could be productives. In other words if you spot some hypothetical nice cola that's not getting enough light, go ahead and defoliate so the cola can get the maximum of light. But this theory has some limits: you can't remove all the leaves just to get a better light penetration on every cola, even if the buds are very good at catching the light, your plant needs some leaves to grab energy + sweat + breath + balance itself, so it's a tricky operation because you need to judge by yourself how far you can go with defoliation. To summup, yes you can defoliate an autoflowering strain, but it must be done with those considerations in mind. Hope that makes sense, keep us up-to-date and happy growing 👊