> Maintainability and understandability only show up when you’re deliberate about them. Extracting meaning into well-named functions is how you practice that. Code aesthetics are a feature and they affect team and agentic coding performance, just not the kind you measure in the runtime.
> And be warned: some will resist this and surrender to the convenience of their current mental context, betting they’ll “remember” how they did it. Time will make that bet age badly. It’s 2026 — other AI agents are already in execution loops, disciplined to code better than that.”
Hard disagree: separating code from its context is exactly how you end up in the situation of needing to “remember”. Yes, helper functions and such can be useful for readability, but it's easy to overdo it and end up with incomprehensible ravioli code that does nothing terribly complicated in a terribly complicated manner.
I think this long post is saying that if you are afraid that moving code behind a function call will slow it down, you can look at the machine code and run a benchmark to convince yourself that it is fine?
We have been able to automatically inline functions for a few decades now. You can even override inlining decisions manually, though that's usually a bad idea unless you're carefully profiling.
Also, it's pointer indirection in data structures that kills you, because uncached memory is brutally slow. Function calls to functions in the cache are normally a much smaller concern except for tiny functions in very hot loops.
I wouldn't have agreed with you a year ago. async traits that were built with boxes had real implications on the memory. But, by design the async abstraction that rust provides is pretty good!
Cool article but I got turned off by the obvious AI-isms which, because of my limited experience with Rust, has me wondering how true any of the article actually is.
> Maintainability and understandability only show up when you’re deliberate about them. Extracting meaning into well-named functions is how you practice that. Code aesthetics are a feature and they affect team and agentic coding performance, just not the kind you measure in the runtime.
> And be warned: some will resist this and surrender to the convenience of their current mental context, betting they’ll “remember” how they did it. Time will make that bet age badly. It’s 2026 — other AI agents are already in execution loops, disciplined to code better than that.”
Hard disagree: separating code from its context is exactly how you end up in the situation of needing to “remember”. Yes, helper functions and such can be useful for readability, but it's easy to overdo it and end up with incomprehensible ravioli code that does nothing terribly complicated in a terribly complicated manner.
I think this long post is saying that if you are afraid that moving code behind a function call will slow it down, you can look at the machine code and run a benchmark to convince yourself that it is fine?
I think it’s making a case that normally you shouldn’t even bother benchmarking it, unless you know that it’s in a critical hot path.
We have been able to automatically inline functions for a few decades now. You can even override inlining decisions manually, though that's usually a bad idea unless you're carefully profiling.
Also, it's pointer indirection in data structures that kills you, because uncached memory is brutally slow. Function calls to functions in the cache are normally a much smaller concern except for tiny functions in very hot loops.
Also to note that the inline directive is optional and the compiler can decide to ignore it (even if you put always if I remember)
I wouldn't have agreed with you a year ago. async traits that were built with boxes had real implications on the memory. But, by design the async abstraction that rust provides is pretty good!
A function call is not necessarily an indirection. Basic premise of the blog is wrong on its face.
Did you read the article? The author makes exactly that point.
Cool article but I got turned off by the obvious AI-isms which, because of my limited experience with Rust, has me wondering how true any of the article actually is.
I don't see anything wrong code-wise, but it's definitely an odd way of making an accumulator. Maybe I'm pedantic