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This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career. It helps actually make the the right tradeoffs, and helps even more in explaining those tradeoffs to colleague of all levels. Highly recommend.
Maybe it wasn't beans? But, I've been looking for it for years.
But if beans are scarce, and that's where you can try to find ways to use less beans per function, then the goal is to make the function more efficient by using less beans.
[0] https://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progr...
Using the language of the article, I’d say “push all your innovation tokens into agents” is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech.
Another way of saying this is “use in-distribution technology”. If agents are substantially better at Rust than Zig, probably you should use Rust, even if Zig is “better”. The amount that Zig is better is going to get swamped by the amount that in-distribution agents are better.
(This is not a claim that Rust actually is better, just a hypothetical fact pattern for discussion.)
4 or 5 years ago if I had to weigh up two options and one was written in rust it was almost a sure thing that the program was snappy, fast, reliable and that the author was competant.
Now it's a sure fire sign that the project was probably vibe coded. Not saying it can't still be good, I just have a different first impression now
Pipelines and deploys gets much easier and faster than the very common TypeScript monorepo, and so does communication between server and client.
And I say that as a TypeScript and Effect aficionado who has no particular love for neither php or ruby, but they are extremely solid choices to move fast, well, and get excellent performance and tooling out of the box.
PHP (lets use this as an example) brings already many benefits over a common solution like a TypeScript monorepo mostly operational simplicity. That was already true before AI.
It's boring, very fast and easy to deploy, offers straightforward horizontal scaling, no need to orchestrate containers and/or multiple runtime processes, has excellent html rendering (nothing in JS-land really does), and has very solid framework solutions like Laravel where everything works out of the box.
Those merits existed before AI already.
The issue was that you had to buy into PHP as a language, which was a horrible experience.
But if AI writes most of the code? Suddenly PHP becomes an excellent candidate to choose for many use cases.
If anything, AI makes the choice of programming and languages and software about finding the right tool for the job. Somehow the industry instead keeps vomiting React/Tailwind slop which are the right tool for 1% of the jobs.
I hope to have cleared the concept.
On the other hand, IBM was late getting into integrated circuits. They had Solid Logic Technology, automated machinery for putting transistors into ceramic substrates to make tiny but discrete circuits. That's what powered the IBM System/360. Worked, but kept mainframe prices high and made IBM late to minicomputers.
Innovation when the problem is hard is more interesting. Look at the history of US long range bombers. The B-29 was effective, but underpowered, and had a lot of trouble getting off the ground fully loaded. So, after WWII, the next development was the B-36, which answered the question "what if we scaled up the B-29?"[1] Six propellers, and four jet engines (added late in the design cycle). Was a sky barge, but it worked, as long as no one was trying hard to shoot it down. No flyable aircraft remain. That was the boring technology approach.
After that came the B-47, which answered the question "what if we scaled up a jet fighter to bomber size?"[2] The B-47 was all jets, no props. It needed solid-fuel rocket boosters (!) to help it get off the ground, and a drag chute to slow it down on landing. It was terrible to fly; its operating speed and altitude were too near the "coffin corner" where stall and Mach buffet meet.[3] No flyable aircraft remain.
Then came the B-52. New engines. New airframe. New design. [4] That's the high-risk approach. It worked. Hundreds are still in active service. Outlasted most of its successors, the B-58 Hustler (a supersonic intercontinental bomber), the B-70, the F-111, etc.
On the commercial side, we have Boeing, whose most successful airliner is a variant of the B-737, which first flew in 1967. But that's another story.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQYG_fA2uM
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-urTRxeEM
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_%28aerodynamics%...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8EURBL53_k
I've found it extremely useful over the years, personally.
We're "scalable" over here. It's a sexy problem to have.
Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains. New technology may be right for that. Novel approaches may be right for that. "Novel" or "New" are only proxies and they're weak.
For example, I may think "New" means untested, but is that true? What if a new project has Jepsen testing, a fuzzing suite, massive compute running tons of oracle tests, etc? I should just say "Choose well tested" instead of "Choose old" - lots of old software is very poorly tested.
Maybe I think that "Old" implies better documentation, but does it? Lots of older projects have insane cruft and weird edge cases that are undocumented and accumulated over years.
Why do we need a metaphor? Why is "innovation token" helpful?
If you're incapable of evaluating a technology in terms of these properties, you aren't a serious developer and "boring" will not save you.
Sit down, write our your requirements, determine candidate solutions, and choose them based on their fit. "Boring" means nothing, it's a vague proxy term. "Well tsted", "performant for our use case", "developers know it", etc mean something.
> MySQL is boring. Postgres is boring. PHP is boring. Python is boring. Memcached is boring. Squid is boring. Cron is boring.
Literally every one of these has caused hilarious and disastrous failures for me in my career. But yep, boring.
> If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens.
What if you know NodeJS really well? Or MongoDb? What if you have empirical, verifiable reasons for why they fit better?
I'm a bit tired of "simple" and "boring" and other nonsense words in this field taking up the air in the room that should be spent evaluating solutions on their actual merits.
So yes, pick boring tech, defined as the tech you know the sharp edges of.
That is, if someone said two sentences, I would only care about the second one:
1. "We should use this because it is boring"
2. "We should use this because we understand the sharp edges"
I wouldn't care at all about (1) and I'd have a real conversation based on (2).
Any productive conversation that starts with (1) immediately has to follow "can you clarify what that means", so the term is useless at best and thought terminating at worst.
The article answers this, and the answer is "no". New technology is one you don't know the details of.
> determine candidate solutions, and choose them based on their fit
That's quite hard to do for solutions that you don't know the details.
You have an objection to something. It's clearly not to the article's point, though.
That's a great thing to discuss when deciding on the technology. Maybe you should aim for solutions that you know well, or a solution that makes migrating away easy, or maybe you need to do some discovery work, etc.
> You have an objection to something. It's clearly not to the article's point, though.
It's an objection to the nature of the article itself - that technical decisions should work this way, that metaphors like "innovation tokens" are useful, that "boring" is a good proxy word.
> What if you know NodeJS really well?
Then you consider it boring. I'm sure Node and MongoDB were singled out by the author because at the time of writing they were still relatively new and undergoing periods of rapid development and change.
> More, I think you need to consider the context of when this was written. It was a period of rapid innovation/evolution
It's linked today, people feel it's relevant today. This isn't a historic piece about how the tech industry used to be, people reference this post today.
> around this time because teams had taken bets on new tech either they didn't know how to use well or the tech didn't take off and was a dead end.
Yes, they should have had a discussion about their requirements and which technologies would have solved them.
> Then you consider it boring.
Then "boring" is useless and you should just say "I know this technology well and it maps to our use case well" and be able to justify that.
However, it's influenced a lot of people for more than a decade and the snippy title might well have something to do with that.
> I'm a bit tired of "simple" and "boring" and other nonsense words in this field...
This is hilarious in sense millions more will be tired and exhausted by evaluating new and exciting technology endlessly appearing all the time.
People go by these rule of thumbs which may not be perfect in every single case but they do increase success chances for even sub-par teams as opposed to "rigorously evaluating latest technology"
> People go by these rule of thumbs which may not be perfect in every single case but they do increase success chances for even sub-par teams as opposed to "rigorously evaluating latest technology"
Rule of thumb. And it's not a rule. It's a bias based on a vague term.
Then they're not boring. Boring isn't a universal trait, it has to be evaluated within the context of your own team.
Sadly, that is real out-of-the-box thinking.
The example they gave was something like they wanted to use rabbitmq for a new side project (I might be misremembering) but they were forced to make it work with redis instead. The author said that years later he found out that that side project had exploded in popularity and it had coped with it fine because the infra team were already handling the stack and it wasn't some snowflake deployment.
Does anyone remember the post I'm talking about?
> A good example of this from my experience is Etsy’s activity feeds. When we built this feature, we were working pretty hard to consolidate most of Etsy onto PHP, MySQL, Memcached, and Gearman (a PHP job server). It was much more complicated to implement the feature on that stack than it might have been with something like Redis (or maybe not). But it is absolutely possible to build activity feeds on that stack.
> An amazing thing happened with that project: our attention turned elsewhere for several years. During that time, activity feeds scaled up 20x while nobody was watching it at all. We made no changes whatsoever specifically targeted at activity feeds, but everything worked out fine as usage exploded because we were using a shared platform. This is the long-term benefit of restraint in technology choices in a nutshell.
edit: Node is boring, as far as the frontend goes -- a notoriously unstable ecosystem.