there’s actually a deep insight to this.
when resource becomes abundant, the genius dies. this is why we had some of the most legendary programmers in the 70s-90s: Linus, Ritchie, van Rossum.
the availability of compute has negative correlation to how cracked you are.
when you learn to squeeze more out of more constrained hardware, you’re forced to be more intricate, more thoughtful.
so you not only become the best at efficiency, that skill seeps into the other skills you must develop as a programmer/researcher.
and this is true in other parts of your life.
If you ever wonder how Chinese frontier models like Kimi, DeepSeek, and Qwen are trained on far fewer (and nerfed) Nvidia GPUs than US models.
In 1969, NASA’s Apollo mission landed people on the moon with a computer that had just 4KB of RAM.
Creativity loves constraints.