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  NickNaraghi
  > Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while.This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career. It helps actually make the the right tradeoffs, and helps even more in explaining those tradeoffs to colleague of all levels. Highly recommend.
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  theptip
  I love this post. It’s also interesting to revisit in the age of agents.Using the language of the article, I’d say “push all your innovation tokens into agents” is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech.Another way of saying this is “use in-distribution technology”. If agents are substantially better at Rust than Zig, probably you should use Rust, even if Zig is “better”. The amount that Zig is better is going to get swamped by the amount that in-distribution agents are better.(This is not a claim that Rust actually is better, just a hypothetical fact pattern for discussion.)
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  iand675
  Well, I've not tried to publish this on HN so far, but I guess given such a counterpoint, I should at least attempt to share: https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-08-07-getting-fr...
• wewewedxfgdf
  Counter-position: "choose most appropriate technology".
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  conrs
  Love this post. Surprisingly controversial; it hasn't made me very many engineering friends.
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  insanitybit
  I'll push back against this, despite it being so popular. I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" and I think this entire concept really blurs the lines and feels sort of unserious.Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains. New technology may be right for that. Novel approaches may be right for that. "Novel" or "New" are only proxies and they're weak.For example, I may think "New" means untested, but is that true? What if a new project has Jepsen testing, a fuzzing suite, massive compute running tons of oracle tests, etc? I should just say "Choose well tested" instead of "Choose old" - lots of old software is very poorly tested.Maybe I think that "Old" implies better documentation, but does it? Lots of older projects have insane cruft and weird edge cases that are undocumented and accumulated over years.Why do we need a metaphor? Why is "innovation token" helpful?If you're incapable of evaluating a technology in terms of these properties, you aren't a serious developer and "boring" will not save you.Sit down, write our your requirements, determine candidate solutions, and choose them based on their fit. "Boring" means nothing, it's a vague proxy term. "Well tsted", "performant for our use case", "developers know it", etc mean something.> MySQL is boring. Postgres is boring. PHP is boring. Python is boring. Memcached is boring. Squid is boring. Cron is boring.Literally every one of these has caused hilarious and disastrous failures for me in my career. But yep, boring.> If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens.What if you know NodeJS really well? Or MongoDb? What if you have empirical, verifiable reasons for why they fit better?I'm a bit tired of "simple" and "boring" and other nonsense words in this field taking up the air in the room that should be spent evaluating solutions on their actual merits.
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  mr_toad
  Does nobody ever think of trying more than one technology? It’s like people buying a car based on what everyone else is driving rather than actually driving different cars.
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  euthymiclabs
  Software that works year-after-year has never been a commodity. It's boring on the surface. It doesn't get the flashy posts. But I'll choose reliable over new in almost all cases.
• piterrro
  https://grugbrain.dev/ Similar on this topic
• Animats
  Some of this may have been a reaction to the era of Javascript framework churn. There were way too many different technologies for doing roughly the same job. They all more or less worked.On the other hand, IBM was late getting into integrated circuits. They had Solid Logic Technology, automated machinery for putting transistors into ceramic substrates to make tiny but discrete circuits. That's what powered the IBM System/360. Worked, but kept mainframe prices high and made IBM late to minicomputers.Innovation when the problem is hard is more interesting. Look at the history of US long range bombers. The B-29 was effective, but underpowered, and had a lot of trouble getting off the ground fully loaded. So, after WWII, the next development was the B-36, which answered the question "what if we scaled up the B-29?"[1] Six propellers, and four jet engines (added late in the design cycle). Was a sky barge, but it worked, as long as no one was trying hard to shoot it down. No flyable aircraft remain. That was the boring technology approach.After that came the B-47, which answered the question "what if we scaled up a jet fighter to bomber size?"[2] The B-47 was all jets, no props. It needed solid-fuel rocket boosters (!) to help it get off the ground, and a drag chute to slow it down on landing. It was terrible to fly; its operating speed and altitude were too near the "coffin corner" where stall and Mach buffet meet.[3] No flyable aircraft remain.Then came the B-52. New engines. New airframe. New design. [4] That's the high-risk approach. It worked. Hundreds are still in active service. Outlasted most of its successors, the B-58 Hustler (a supersonic intercontinental bomber), the B-70, the F-111, etc.On the commercial side, we have Boeing, whose most successful airliner is a variant of the B-737, which first flew in 1967. But that's another story.[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQYG_fA2uM[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-urTRxeEM[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_%28aerodynamics%...[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8EURBL53_k
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  clueless
  I remember reading this back in 2015, but how is this not just the age old conservative (don't do more than needed) vs progressives (lets try some new risk things) debate? As much as I can relate to a more conservative choice when choosing tech that might power a giant consumer company, sometimes using riskier tech in a startup makes more sense to get the real innovation flowing... and the idea of "Choose New Technology, Sometimes" just feels like a little cheat to get away from the bigger issue with the overall thesis. In this way, the idea in this blog just feels so out of touch.
• tetrisgm
  The title reminds me of Gunpei Yokoi, the original genius designer at Nintendo, whose philosophy was: lateral thinking, with old technology
• exabrial
  nawh. 50x node modules, typescript out the wazoo, all the state in the client (where you can't see it in prod), the most over-complicated UI, paired with async callback spaghetti is what you do these days.We're "scalable" over here. It's a sexy problem to have.
• jcmontx
  Excellent post. Now, somewhat outdated, and in other ways, more relevant than ever. To whom it may concern: if you need a database, always choose postgresql.
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  dwedge
  I read a similar blog post years ago about restricting the technologies you use, and making do with a slightly worse option if it means reusing the stack you already have.The example they gave was something like they wanted to use rabbitmq for a new side project (I might be misremembering) but they were forced to make it work with redis instead. The author said that years later he found out that that side project had exploded in popularity and it had coped with it fine because the infra team were already handling the stack and it wasn't some snowflake deployment.Does anyone remember the post I'm talking about?
• geophile
  Think inside the box!Sadly, that is real out-of-the-box thinking.
• westoque
  i just did an AI hackathon and 90% of the submissions were written in TypeScript and Next.js which is mostly due to the training data. AI is skewed to use these tools by default vs the best for the job.
• gaigalas
  Go hard boring on 80% of what you do. Go hard exciting on the 20% else.Don't let one affect the other.
• tosh
  aged well
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  martythemaniak
  The problem with this is that the list of tech that gets boring changes all time, faster than people's opinions. Kubernetes is very boring tech, but if you go through the old discussion threads on this (even from the last year or two), Kubernetes is still cited as some brand new wizbang thing you shouldn't spend tokens on.
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  tosh
  now 11y later i wonder if 'node.js' still needs an innovation token or not
• dofm
  A problem shared is a problem halved.
• mewens
  [flagged]
• moresVanpersi
  [dead]
• positron26
  Lol. In 2015 boring technology is at the hands of your PM spinning up some agent spam. Bury this pile of outdated thinking. Go hard at the most difficult programming you can find or go home.