Hand-optimizing hot spots barely matters any more, because the libraries are already fast and CPUs are extremely good at running bad code quickly; what is left is architecture.

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• How data is laid out and how it is accessed are architectural decisions with nothing to do with hot spots, and the difference between two layouts can be enormous. CMCasey Muratori26 Aug 2026
• "Optimize it later" would be safe advice only if every engineer already knew how to avoid the architectural mistakes that no later optimization can remove. CMCasey Muratori26 Aug 2026
• The steady stream of "we had to rewrite the whole thing because it was too slow" engineering blog posts is the proof that deferring performance to hotspot optimization does not work. CMCasey Muratori26 Aug 2026
• Everyone on a team who makes architectural decisions must understand performance, because a codebase that can be optimized later only ends up that way on purpose. CMCasey Muratori26 Aug 2026
• Criticism that a simpler, scaled-up architecture underperforms a heavily hand-optimized baseline actually demonstrates why that architecture-scaling research matters. GWGwern11 Jun 2021

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