Helix deleted a large chunk of their chip-routing software that had become obsolete as customers brought their own setups. The removal freed up the codebase enough that adding support for AWS Trainium chips — an alternative to Nvidia GPUs — took only a few days instead of weeks. The post frames this as the 'subtraction dividend': the hidden value unlocked by removing code rather than accumulating it, arguing most engineering teams are sitting on similar gains without realizing it.
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