publish: true gemini: true tags:

• software_engineering
• site_reliability created: ‘2026-05-04 14:40’ last_modified: ‘2026-05-04 14:40:00’ status: evergreen confidence: fact

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

Spending resources making a function faster before proving it is actually the system’s bottleneck is a massive waste of engineering effort. Wait until profiles prove where the delay is.¹

Footnotes

1. Knuth, D. (1974). Computer Programming as an Art. ↩