The book “The Goal” has been paying way more dividends in this era than I expected it’s a book about the Theory of Constraints, I read it awhile back as part of lean six sigma training in a nutshell, most optimizations are a waste of time in a complex system. There can be unintended second order effects that actually reduce throughput elsewhere in the system what’s better is to identify bottlenecks (80/20 useful here) and focus on optimizing those as you go vs. the entire system find this is beyond true in the agentic coding era, where I see very complex setups with dubious results my method isn’t for everyone as I want things somewhat chaotic for creative and quantum leaps, but a method I’ve been using to ship like crazy is just learn as you go, focus on throughput, and optimize repetitive bottlenecks as you identify them this has served me very well, and I’ve found a lot of the over optimization to be noise