The engineering community rediscovers: programs can be hardened and optimized indefinitely

The engineering community notes that any program can be continuously hardened (handling edge cases, tightening inputs) and optimized (profiling, benchmarking, rewriting) essentially without limit. This incurs time, attention, and opportunity costs, so it is important to decide when to stop and what trade-offs to accept; automated agents, however, can continue the drilling indefinitely.