Mechanical Sympathy: When Engineers Understand Their Machines
The term "Mechanical Sympathy" originated with Sir Jackie Stewart, a three-time Formula 1 World Champion, who used it to describe the intuitive understanding a driver needs of a car's capabilities in order to drive it well. The concept was later adopted by Martin Thompson, who applied it to software development. Thompson argued that developers should hold a working knowledge of the underlying hardware in order to write efficient code.
The idea has since been broadened further. Unmesh Joshi observed that so-called "Expert Generalists" tend to exhibit a sympathy for domains that are related to their own work, extending the principle beyond just hardware.
Further Reading
For a deeper dive, Caer Sanders wrote a long-form piece on their use of mechanical sympathy when building performance-sensitive systems, ranging from AI inference platforms to novel binary encodings.
