I don't have many regrets about having spent my career in (relatively) tiny companies by comparison, but it sure does sound fun to be on the other side for this kind of thing - the scale where micro-optimizations have macro impact.

In startups I've put more effort into squeezing blood from a stone for far less change; even if the change was proportionally more significant to the business. Sometimes it would be neat to say "something I did saved $X million dollars or saved Y kWh of energy" or whatever.

I've heard of some people getting banned from FB to save memory space? Surely that can't be the case but I swear I've seen something like that

> LLMs are at most another factor added on

At most... Think 10x rather than 0.1x or 1x.