Ideas Weave Every Narrative with AI.
We’ve all felt the dread of learning a new skill, knowing AI can do it faster. But when it comes to programming, AI’s fluency in strict languages like OCaml isn’t a reason to give up—it’s a signal. Learning difficult, compositional languages trains the exact judgment and auditing capabilities that probability engines lack. The future belongs to those who can spot the elegantly flawed code AI generates.
Jane Street’s Bonsai UI library is a masterpiece of functional programming – until it hits the browser. The firm had to build a userland trampoline to work around JavaScript’s lack of tail call optimization, exposing the brutal truth: the web is inherently hostile to functional purity, no matter how much money or talent you throw at it.
Jane Street’s Incremental framework doesn’t just optimize code — it changes the fundamental question you ask. Instead of ‘how can I make this computation faster?’, it asks ‘what computation actually needs to happen?’ The result is a system that runs 100x faster by doing almost nothing. The real lesson? Most performance problems aren’t about speed — they’re about scope.