My Amiga had little memory. Today I have too many tabs open.

I still keep my Amiga 600 and 1200. They taught me plenty, including something I risk forgetting today: resources are not infinite.

When I wrote a program, I had to watch the memory. If something would not fit, I went back to the code. I tried to understand what I was keeping unnecessarily, what I could reuse and where I had made things complicated.

Today I have much more computing power. And sometimes I notice that my first reaction has changed: the program is slow? Add resources. It uses too much memory? Buy more.

Convenient. But I would like to pause before reaching for my wallet.

Imagine we need to count the lines in a file. I can load the whole thing into memory or read it one line at a time, updating the count. With a small file, it probably makes little difference. With a very large one, the difference becomes noticeable.

The question is simple: to count those lines, do I really need to keep them all in memory?

I would like to ask myself questions like that more often. Do I need to copy this data? Must I repeat this operation a thousand times? Why does this program keep working even when nobody is using it?

Each bit of waste seems small until we put them together. Eventually someone pays: through a higher bill, a battery that runs out sooner or time spent waiting in front of a screen.

Artificial intelligence has made writing code even easier. In a few seconds, I can get a program that works. Then I still need to read it and understand what it is doing. If I give it a mountain of data, will it keep working well? How many resources will it use?

The fact that the code arrived quickly does not remove my responsibility to check it.

Of course, I do not want to spend three days saving two bytes. I want clear code that does its job well. When something uses too many resources, I prefer to measure where the problem comes from before changing everything.

And then there is a resource I cannot increase by buying another computer: my attention.

I open a project, then an article, then a new tool. Meanwhile, I get an idea and open another tab. By evening, I have started twelve things and finished almost nothing. The computer coped beautifully. I did slightly less well.

That is why I still think of my Amigas. They remind me that programming also means making choices: what we need, what we can avoid and when it is time to stop and understand.

Today we have extraordinary tools. I would like us to become just as good at using them with care.

Adding RAM is easy. That other part, unfortunately, does not come bundled with the GPU.