SOTA Performance Engineering

Purpose

Make systems fast by default and find why they are slow by evidence. This skill encodes two disciplines that share one rule set:

1. BUILD — write code whose performance characteristics are known, budgeted, and protected by regression tests before it ships.
2. AUDIT — read existing code and telemetry to locate bottlenecks, rank them by user-facing impact, and prescribe fixes with expected gains.

Core doctrine: measure first, but fix known pathologies on sight. Profiling is mandatory before micro-optimization; it is NOT required to remove an O(n²) loop, an N+1 query, or an unbounded cache. "Premature optimization" never excuses shipping a known pathology.

BUILD mode