Zinger

Quick rant and thoughts on the state of software design & engineering. It comes as no surprise that the models have allowed designers to implement and explore their wildest dreams. But I cannot explain enough how much more important that makes understanding the lowest levels of the stack Take for example these demos. It turns out that instant launch, a fast + instantly zoomable grid, and morphing photo clusters onto the surface of a globe are actually all underpinned by the same technical component: a really fast image thumbnail cache (and cache management). There is a lot more detail that goes into making each experience independently high quality, but that cache is the biggest performance bottleneck for each one - because ultimately they all depend on extremely fast data retrieval to even exist. You can’t use a globe that doesn’t spin and you can’t use a grid you can’t see or scroll. Therefore they never get built and die in imagination land. Achieving your design goals requires being able to identify their core infrastructural overlap Obviously you don’t need to know every detail, but it’s now your responsibility now to use the models to help you uncover your unknown unknowns about the hidden connections in any system you are building. The proper solution is latent in your unoptimized code. Its complexity is the raw material you need to chisel away at and navigate to the “correct” side of the solution space Will the models be able to come to conclusions like this autonomously soon? Yes. I think there will need to be advancements in the ability to quickly reason about and quantify the complexity (whatever that means) of a given piece of software and instantly determine what to chop up / refactor / redesign as it develops into its simplest possible form. That might not mean the fewest or tersest LOC but perhaps how few turns it takes a model to achieve a verified solution to any given task, or how tangled its code reference graph is. But I think it will always be an advantage to know where to poke