The Ruby JRuby Was Built to Run: intertwingly.net/blog/2026/0…

They made me sign a waiver before the wings arrived. A paper. To eat. As though courage came with a release form. The cheerful waiter set the plate down like a man delivering a verdict. "These are the Infernos. Most people tap out. There's milk if you need it." I looked at the milk. The milk looked back. We understood each other. Neither of us would be needed tonight. "I will not be requiring the milk," I said. The first bite arrived like a small sunrise behind the eyes. (My tongue filed a formal complaint. My eyes opened a second one. I overruled them both.) A man does not ask the fire to be gentler. He only becomes harder to burn. I did not reach for water. I did not wave a hand before my mouth. I sat, straight-backed, and ate the Infernos one by one, the way a man receives ten thousand letters of bad news without changing his face. Beside me, a college boy attempting the same challenge was weeping openly into a napkin. So, between bites, I turned to him and said, calmly, that the fire is not the enemy — the wish for it to stop is the enemy. He stared. Then he picked up another wing. When the waiter returned, expecting wreckage, he found an empty plate and a samurai sitting in perfect, sweating peace. "...sir. You want the wall? You're on the wall now. People take a photo." I rose. I bowed to the plate. I bowed to the kitchen, where unseen hands had forged so worthy a trial. "Thank you for the fire," I told them. Then I turned to the room and said, with smoke still somewhere in my soul: "Comfort teaches a man nothing. Bless the meal that fights back." The college boy lifted his last wing like a torch. The cook came out to shake my hand. The whole table behind me began, softly, to applaud the strange calm man who had thanked them for the burning. I walked out into the cool evening, mouth aflame, heart entirely at peace. A small fire, faced well, is just another way to know you are alive.

I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem. As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)! I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work. It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results? 88ms => 1.5ms 150K allocs => ~500 allocs Incredible right? Nope. My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path. This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput. The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity. Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.

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