jokes aside, have you heard of the Jevons Paradox[1]? it feels like the "induced demand" effect to me with the whole "just one more lane" phenomenon you sometimes can see in roadways. when you increase the efficiency of a thing you thereby expand the set of things it can economically be used for, causing an overall increase in total consumption over time - not a decrease like you'd expect from just having made it much more efficient. "a smaller slice of a much bigger pie is still more pie" or something like that.

in TypeScript's case with the "pie" being compute time, things like HKTs (e.g. hotscript, hkt-toolbelt) that might not have made as much sense in the past suddenly become so much more feasible, but also are the very things that drag that hard-fought efficiency win back down into the mud. is it worth it? library authors will ultimately be the ones to decide the big chunks of that question by virtue of what they ship in their types.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Yes, I saw the YouTube video about Jevons paradox from Hank Green yesterday. :)

the difference is with roads you dont get a lot of good secondary effects, one lane is just like the next. benefits are linear with the cost so they balance out. but with typescript and software in general they can be exponential.

fast type inference unlocks brand new patterns that were too slow to be practical on the old checker. at least some of them will turn out to be useful for peoples projects. and its also great for legacy or less complex code bases that will get faster type checking for free.