Comment by ItsMonkk

I think there's a story in here that most are missing, but your comment is closest to touching on. This was not a performance problem. This was a fundamental problem that surfaced as a performance issue.

The tech stack at use in the Windows Terminal project is new code bolted onto old code, and no one on the existing team knows how that old code works. No one understands what it's doing. No one knows when the things that old code needed to do was still needed.

It took someone like Casey who knew gamedev to know instinctually that all of that stuff was junk and you could rewrite it in a weekend. The Microsoft devs, if they wanted to dive into the issue, would be forced to Chesteron's Fence every single line of code. It WOULD have taken them years.

We've always recommended that programmers know the code one and possibly two layers below them. This recommendation failed here, it failed during the GTA loading times scandal. It has failed millions of times and the ramifications of that failing is causing chaos of performance issues.

I'm come to realize that much of the problems that we have gotten ourselves into is based on what I call feedback bandwidth. If you are an expert, as Casey is, you have infinite bandwidth, and you are only limited by your ability to experiment. If your ability to change is a couple seconds, you will be able to create projects that are fundamentally impossible without that feedback.

If you need to discuss something with someone else, that bandwidth drops like a stone. If you need a team of experts, all IMing each-other 1 on 1, you might as well give up. 2 week Agile sprints are much better than months to years long waterfall, but we still have so much to learn. If you only know if the sprint is a success after everyone comes together, you are doomed. The people iterating dozens of times every hour will eat your shorts.

I'm not saying that only a single developer should work on entire projects. But what I am saying is that when you have a Quarterback and Wide Receiver that are on the same page, talking at the same abstraction level, sometimes all it takes is one turn, one bit of information, to know exactly what the other is about to do. They can react together.

Simple is not easy. Matching essential complexity might very well be impossible. Communication will never be perfect. But you have to give it a shot.