Kaze Emanuar spent weeks shaving 100 microseconds off arctan on the Nintendo 64
r/programming·low signal
An r/programming post (208 upvotes, 28 comments) covers Kaze Emanuar's video on rewriting arctan for the N64, framed by his own admission that weeks of work bought 100 microseconds. It is the counterexample to agentic coding's throughput story: the work that still requires a human is the work where the search space is tiny, the constraints are exact and the payoff is measured in microseconds. Off my usual beat, but it was the top r/programming item today.