[kikimora]

If done right optimizing for performance also achieves readability and maintenance. There is an edge case when you rewrite a loop with SIMD or use branch less programming. It is so rare but a focus of so many articles.

I do see a lot of system that are both slow and hard to maintain because people focus on maintenance. They create abstractions upon abstractions in the name of maintainability to later find it does not work well with their hardware and infrastructure prompting more complexity in the name of performance.

[bunderbunder]

I’ve never known towering abstractions to be good for maintainability, anyway. It sounds great on paper, but in practice it often ends up being extra mechanism to have to think your way through on your way to understanding a problem. Or they constrain the set of possible solutions you can undertake without major refactoring.

That isn’t to say abstractions are inherently harmful. But when I see codebases that really go nuts for it, it’s rarely the case that they were all carefully considered before implementation.

[lo1tuma]

I agree. Over-engineering is something many projects suffer from. Principles like YAGNI and KISS help, but it is hard to enforce them by tooling. So it remains a discipline of the engineers.

[nijave]

In 2026, I remain hopeful AGENTS.md can help close that gap

[kikimora]

Reading a DDD book does not make you a good architect. Often it makes you worse :) How AI or agents supposed to learn this art?

[nijave]

Nothing like waiting 20 minutes for a test suite that should have taken 2

[lo1tuma]

Yep, fast feedback cycles are important.