> Compare that to a smart engineer who doesn't have that wisdom: those people might have an easier time jumping in to difficult problems without the mental burden of knowing all of the problems upfront.
My favorite story in CS related to this is how Huffman Coding came to be [1]
Re:Nvidia NemoClaw
by austinthetaco on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @01:16PM
(#47428462)
This is so incredibly accurate. I see all these side projects people are spinning up and can't help but think "Sure it might work at first but the first time i have to integrate it with something else i'll have to spend a week trying to get them to work. Hell that'll probably require an annoying rewrite and its not even worth what I get out of it"
Compare that to a smart engineer who doesn't have that wisdom: those people might have an easier time jumping in to difficult problems without the mental burden of knowing all of the problems upfront.
The most meaningful technical advances I've personally seen always started out as "let's just do it, it will only take a weekend" and then 2 years later, you find yourself with a finished product. (If you knew it would take 2 years from the start, you might have never bothered)
Naivety isn't always a bad thing.