August 13, 2026
Boring won, and the comments know it
Choose Boring Technology (2015)
The 2015 advice telling builders to stop chasing shiny toys is suddenly very hot again
TLDR: The essay says companies should save their risky ideas for what actually makes them special and use dependable tools for everything else. Commenters are treating it like prophecy: most cheer its common-sense warning, while others add a new twist by saying today’s big gamble should be AI, not the basics.
A nearly decade-old essay about picking dependable tools instead of flashy new ones has the comments section acting like it just dropped yesterday. The original piece, Choose Boring Technology, argues that every company only gets a few big swings — or as fans lovingly repeat, a few “innovation tokens.” Spend them on your actual mission, not on reinventing basic plumbing. In plain English: if your business is selling crafts, moving money, or running a service, maybe don’t burn your energy on trendy experiments just because they look cool.
And wow, the crowd is eating it up. One commenter simply declared “aged well,” which is basically the internet equivalent of a smug mic drop. Others called the post a career-changing framework, saying the “innovation tokens” idea helped them make better choices and avoid expensive chaos. The strongest opinion in the thread is clear: reliable beats exciting when real businesses and real customers are on the line.
But of course, there’s drama. One fan admitted loving this take is “surprisingly controversial” and hasn’t won them many engineering friends — a delicious hint that plenty of people still want the shiny stuff. Then came the 2025 plot twist: in the age of AI assistants, some say the smartest move is to spend all your risky bets on AI and keep everything else boring. That sparked the funniest subtext of all: even the rebels are now arguing for boring foundations. The nerds may disagree on where to be bold, but the comments are basically chanting the same message: please, for the love of uptime, stop making your lives harder on purpose.
Key Points
- •The article presents a framework in which companies have a limited number of "innovation tokens" available for novel technical choices.
- •It argues that spending those tokens on infrastructure or platform novelty can distract from a company's core business mission.
- •The article distinguishes "boring" from "bad" and recommends mature technologies whose capabilities and failure modes are well understood.
- •Examples of "boring" technologies in the article include MySQL, Postgres, PHP, Python, Memcached, Squid, and Cron.
- •It emphasizes that technology choices should be optimized across the whole organization because each additional tool increases system and team complexity.