This entire conversation is about tradeoffs, but I would note that some of my favorite engineers that I've had the pleasure of knowing are: 1) very fast and 2)

This entire conversation is about tradeoffs, but I would note that some of my favorite engineers that I've had the pleasure of knowing are: 1) very fast and 2) know exactly what the binary code of the thing they are trying to do looks like There's a (3) where they'll quickly confirm their hypothesis using godbolt (or similar) if in doubt or they want to actually think in binary. Fortunately for the programming community, many of us are able to create useful or interesting things without that kind of depth