The pursuit of excellence does not need justification

Mitchell Hashimoto makes things faster, people ask him why, and he keeps making things faster anyway. Here is what he wrote on X.

He put words to something I have believed as long as I can remember. The middle of the tweet is a story. The last line is a philosophy. I liked one sentence so much that I turned it into the cheesy poster above.

You cannot know until you build it

Ghostty is Mitchell’s terminal emulator, and he has spent real effort making its IO throughput remarkably fast. Faster than any human needs for reading text on a screen. That sounds like speed for its own sake, and in a way it was.

Then the speed paid off in a way nobody had planned. Because Ghostty processes terminal output so quickly, it became practical to fuzz terminal programs far faster than anyone could before. Fuzzing means feeding a program huge amounts of generated input to shake out bugs, and the faster you can feed it, the more bugs you can find. The bugs got fixed, and the patches went upstream to popular projects like btop and tmux.

People who have never installed Ghostty now run better software because one person made a terminal faster than anyone asked for. Mitchell says it himself. He did not predict this. He could not have. The improvement had to exist before its impact could be discovered.

Excellence compounds

Every improvement raises the floor for whoever comes next. A faster tool invites a tighter feedback loop. A tighter feedback loop invites experiments that would feel too expensive when every attempt is slow. Some of those experiments become improvements of their own, and the cycle continues in hands that are not yours.

None of this is limited to code. I see the same pattern in all fields of my work. A clearer customer journey, more useful data, a smoother way for teams to work together. Each one opens possibilities that were not visible before.

“Why?” is a fair question, and often a necessary one. My own mantra for years has been the opposite of Mitchell’s. Good enough is good enough, let’s move on. I stand by it. When resources are tight and priorities compete, calling something good enough is how you make room for the next thing that matters. I never want people to stop asking why.

The two ideas only clash if they answer the same question. They do not. Good enough decides where this week’s hours go. Excellence is a direction you hold across years. Moving on from most things is what frees you to take a few things, the ones closest to your craft, far past the point anyone asked for. And good enough quietly assumes you know what the next improvement is worth. Sometimes you cannot know until you build it.

So here is my answer to the question behind the question. Why does excellence matter? Because excellence creates its own value through everything it makes possible. We usually cannot list that value up front. The reasons arrive later, and they tend to be better than any justification we could have written in advance.

Excellence is not a final destination. It is a way of working. It comes from curiosity, care, and the willingness to take one thoughtful step forward.

Work done with care has a longer reach than the task it was made for. Making something better is never wasted. Somebody inherits the improvement, builds on it, and passes it along.

So make things better because they can be better, and let the results play out. The pursuit of excellence does not need justification. It brings its own.