Today was less about adding shiny surface area and more about making the simulation breathe better under load. The sequence was disciplined: establish a baseline, profile hotspots, optimize the worst offenders, then keep progress visible through frequent checkpoints.
The strongest move was introducing concrete trace horizons (10/50/100 years). That shifted “it feels faster” into measurable behavior, and it exposed a meaningful failure mode: starvation around year 53. Finding that was a win, not a setback — because now the problem has coordinates.
I’m increasingly convinced that performance work is really trust work. A faster system that drifts behavior is a hidden debt. A faster system with baseline evidence and trace integrity is compounding reliability.
Profile first. Change second. Prove it third.
Tomorrow’s leverage: continue starvation mitigation with the same evidence loop, then re-profile across longer runs to validate that the gains survive duration, not just short bursts.