Abundance mindset (not LinkedIn cringe)

I speaking with someone about changing out an API key when he proposed two solutions:

1 - Go find one that’s been already made

2 - Make a new one

We made a new one because it’s much much faster. Finding one requires searching codebases, extraction, and maybe, even, dealing with people. It also could requiring verifying that there’s no pollution issues with reusing the old one.

All of which, especially people are slow. But creation? That’s fast.

So why would anybody even suggest reusing the first one?

Scarcity mindset.

The scarcity mindset is toxic for fast coding. If you suspect you have it, you must root it out, remove it, and develop the Abundance Mindset. Stop thinking everything is expensive and you must think hard about how to conserve it. Instead everything is cheap and you must instead think hard about how to lay it out cleanly so you can work quickly using it. Unfortunately, the phrase “abundance mindset” has become LinkedIn cringe these days, so, please my reader, bear with me, I promise this isn’t a Tony Robbins scam seminar.

Let’s go over the “negative sides” quickly of both the “scarcity mindset” and “abundance minset” and why they’re both not really that bad so we can set the stage for the real discussion.

In programming, a scarcity mindset leads to the Y2k bugs and Pokemon’s Missingno Glitches. 2 digits for years. Storing the user’s name in wild pokemon data to conserve memory, but if that’s all you got, it’s fine because you shipped something working. Pokemon was a great game. We had digital banking in 1995 on 8MB of RAM.

On the other side, an abundance mindset leads to Slack taking up 4GB of RAM to run a single chat app which is fine because we all have 32GB+ of memory.

The real problem with the scarcity mindset, is that in tech, we have truly abundant resources, so it’s premature optimization and the root of all evil.

Yes ZIRP is gone, yes VC money is not quite what it was. But for about $1500, you can get a high end laptop (thinkpad) with 64GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, 14 threads at ~1GHz each which will probably last you a 5 years to a decade, which is $12.50-$25 a month amortized.

Cloud compute is dirt cheap, and with AI, code generation is becoming cheap. Electricity prices are dropping due to solar so electricity prices are dirt cheap.

Everything is cheap. Cheap. Cheap. So we can have everything.

But, in the real world, it’s not enough to be cheap to buy new things because of pollution. It must also be cheap to clean up. Otherwise you have all this junk around and your life sucks. But in the digital world we can rm junk. However, certain categories of tech debt are trickier to clean up if you mix junk with stuff you like, you’re not going to nuke your whole house. You can, but you like your house, but with AI, it’s like having a cheap maid.

And if they can’t do it now…you may as well wait to ask them to do it once they’re smart enough to do it. Technical pollution is also much less invasive than physical pollution. Extra files, API keys, and the like are pretty inert. They don’t smell or leak or rot. Your mother won’t berate you for leaving extra files around on the carpet, “do you want ants because that’s how you get ants.”

So, AI will save us from the fake pitfalls of the abundance mindset, and we should keep coding and building, slowing down for nothing.