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AI Writing Code Makes Premature Optimization Viable

AI-generated code makes premature optimization viable, as the traditional cost of writing and maintaining optimized code early is reduced. Developers can now have AI produce efficient implementations upfront without the same productivity penalties.

Background

- The article discusses how AI coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or ChatGPT writing code) change the old software engineering rule against "premature optimization" — the idea, famously attributed to Donald Knuth, that you shouldn't optimize code for speed or efficiency until you know it's actually needed, because optimization makes code harder to read and maintain.

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