Simon Willison’s Weblog

6th February 2019 - Link Blog

Questions for a new technology. Kellan poses 8 questions which should be asked of any technology that is being proposed for inclusion in an existing tech stack. I’m particularly fond of “Will this solution kill and eat the solution that it replaces?”. My rule of thumb these days is that new technology either needs to make something possible that isn’t possible at all with the existing stack, or it needs to represent at least a 3X productivity improvement in order to compensate for the switching and retraining costs across a large team.