(Your) pursuit of excellence is meaningless

In a tweet, Mitchell Hashimoto wrote, "The pursuit of excellence does not need justification." Hashimoto was defending why he optimizes his terminal program Ghostty beyond a point of reasonableness. I want to say why I disagree with the philosophy behind that statement.

Hashimoto claims the other improvements that came about show a justification ("let the results naturally play out"), but this dodges the philosophical question, since "but why?" also applies to those improvements.

Although Hashimoto talks about optimization — a utilitarian thing — as a justification, I think his motivation behind that statement comes from an aesthetic point of view. The statement conflates two different ideas: excellence in terms of utility, and excellence in terms of aesthetics. The statement borrows the social cachet of aesthetic or artistic excellence, and then applies it to a computer program, a utilitarian object. Aesthetically, we appreciate how fast we can make the program — and then later we'll find out what utility value that will actually grant.

It's true that computer programs can have aesthetic value — as a former programmer myself, I was often trying to put my sense of aesthetics into programs, choosing variable names or structuring code in pleasing ways. But now, with the advent of LLMs, it's hard for me to look back on this activity and not see it as neurotic. It's not that it's impossible to pursue aesthetic values in that medium, but it isn't a medium conducive to it — especially in a commercial context where other constraints often are higher priority. It's difficult to imagine deriving value from the process of selecting variable names, when you can have an AI program do it for you and have a comparable program in a utilitarian sense. So the aim of having a computer program is wrapped up in its purpose, and pursuing the development of computer programs necessarily negates the aesthetic values and sense of craft you might get building it, if you're building it in the most efficient way with AI.

Pursuing excellence in an artistic sense — that needs no justification, because one is showing their Flower — the unique Painting of their existence. The end goal there is expression, not utility. Pursuing excellence in a utilitarian sense, however, is only a means to an end. In that latter sense, if you make that pursuit without an appropriate end in mind, then you have succumbed to the Pyramid, and lost the path to genuine self-expression.

An acceptable re-phrasing of the tweet might be, "My pursuit of excellence needs no justification", because "I love my program's aesthetic value, and the process of building it." That is grounded in one's own values.

What isn't acceptable about the original tweet is how it is normative — implicitly saying that we would all be better off if we pursued excellence. And this is false — because pursuing things you're not enthusiastic about is not good for you, or the world, and our limited time in this world is precious. Pursuing excellence is one thing we might choose to do, and it's acceptable to value doing other things.

Enthusiasm needs no justification. But enthusiasm is not about the result — it's about the process, and the excitement one feels about the activity. If you are enthusiastic about pursuing something that is just a utility, you should be asking yourself, what is the aim in mind? Is it serving your self-expression? Do you really value the activity, or are you getting caught up in some kind of meaningless optimization loop, building a functional thing with no deeper connection to it?

We shouldn't idolize the pursuit of excellence for those things to our own detriment. We shouldn't feel bad because we didn't make Michelangelo's David — the technical abilities and enthusiasm required for that are rare, and our lives can still be valuable without that level of excellence.

Excellence of utility has to be attached to an end goal that we care about. And if we don't have the patience for such focus on utilitarian objects, that's ok. We shouldn't establish a communal worship of utilitarian excellence outside of any connection to things people care about.

So, those "but why?" questions that triggered the tweet are exactly the right questions. The worship of utilitarian excellence is an ideology. It grinds people under its feet in pursuit of productivity, to the benefit of those at the top of the Pyramid. It doesn't make the world better. It fills it with our burned-out husks.