The Case for Slower Software

Or: what an old glass terminal taught me about the floor of useful interaction.

Last winter I rewrote a storage query planner from scratch—not because our queries were slow, but because I wanted to understand why they were fast. Three months later the answer fit in one sentence: the optimizer had been right all along.

The Speed Paradox

Every quarter we ship another round of latency improvements. Eighty milliseconds vanish here, forty there. The monitors glow greener with each deploy, but our users cannot tell the difference. We had optimized into silence—the kind that means nobody cares, because the thing you fixed was never broken.

A user should never feel the weight of someone else’s optimization. Speed is invisible until it is absent.

The terminal on my desk runs at 9600 baud. Below the floor of useful interaction, speed work matters. Above it, the system already feels instant.