We spent a decade optimizing compilation times. Now we’re staring at an LLM spinner doing the exact same thing.
Same chair. Same frustrated sigh. Same muscle memory reaching for the browser tab while the machine does its thing.
We spent years shaving seconds off build times. Incremental compilation, distributed builds, caching layers. Entire teams optimized for this. And it worked - builds got fast enough that we stopped thinking about them.
Now there’s a new spinner. Different technology, identical behavior. Staring at a progress indicator, wondering if it’s stuck, doing a mental cost-benefit analysis of whether to cancel and try again.
I caught myself timing Claude responses last week. Eight seconds felt long. I used to wait four minutes for a C++ build without blinking.
The funniest part: we’re probably going to solve this one too. Faster models, local inference, speculative decoding. Give it three years. And then something new will make us wait, and we’ll alt-tab through that one as well.
We didn’t get more patient. We just rotate what we’re impatient about.
What’s the wait you swore you’d never tolerate again - that you’ve completely forgotten about?