"Choose Boring Technology" essay resurfaces on Hacker News, sparking debate on innovation tokens
An 11-year-old piece on constraining technology risk gets renewed attention and reexamination in an era of AI and rapid tooling change.
Conversation activity · last 36 hours presspostscomments the crowd ↓
Every item, in order 17
Latest coverage newest 4 of 4 items
What to know
- McKinley's 2015 essay on the "innovation tokens" framework—treating constrained technology risk as a resource to budget—has become canonical guidance for engineering leaders but also a flashpoint for dissent.
- The renewed discussion in 2026 reflects tension between the essay's bias toward mature tech and modern developers who want to evaluate novel tools on merit rather than dismiss them by category.
- Some engineers argue the framework should evolve to account for AI agents, while others worry it has been weaponized to block legitimate innovation across the industry.
How it unfolded
-
Rienbdj acknowledges the quality of the original essay but expresses frustration that it has been invoked to justify thousands of lazy arguments against any innovation over the past decade.
“This blog post annoys me a little. Not the post itself - it's great - but how it has been used to prop up thousands of lazy arguments against innovations over the years.”
rienbdj · Hacker News ↗ -
Insanitybit pushes back against the essay's framework, arguing that "innovation tokens" is an arbitrary metaphor that obscures the real work of evaluating requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and gains on their merits rather than by novelty proxy.
“I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" and I think this entire concept really blurs the lines and feels sort of unserious. Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains.”
insanitybit · Hacker News ↗ -
Commenter theptip argues the essay's logic applies to modern AI agents, suggesting teams should concentrate innovation tokens in agent capabilities while keeping underlying tech "boring" and in-distribution for better model performance.
“Using the language of the article, I'd say "push all your innovation tokens into agents" is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech.”
theptip · Hacker News ↗ -
Commenter NickNaraghi endorses the essay's central idea, calling the innovation tokens concept "one of the most useful concepts" for PMs and engineering leaders making technical tradeoffs.
“This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career.”
NickNaraghi · Hacker News ↗ -
User tosh resubmits the same essay, which rapidly climbs to 371 points with significant discussion, indicating renewed interest in the piece.
-
User shahargl submits the essay to Hacker News, receiving only 2 points and no comments initially.
- 606 weeks quiet
-
McKinley, drawing from his experience at Etsy under Kellan Elliott-McCrea, introduces the "innovation tokens" framework: companies have roughly three tokens to spend on novel technology choices, and should bias toward mature, well-understood tools for non-core systems.
What people are saying verbatim
“Let's say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while.”
Dan McKinley, Essay author · Choose Boring Technology (2015) ↗
“"Boring" should not be conflated with "bad." There is technology out there that is both boring and bad. You should not use any of that. But there are many choices of technology that are boring and good, or at least good enough.”
Dan McKinley, Essay author · Choose Boring Technology (2015) ↗
“This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career.”
NickNaraghi, PM/engineering leader, Hacker News commenter · Hacker News ↗ · Aug 12
“Using the language of the article, I'd say "push all your innovation tokens into agents" is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech.”
theptip, Hacker News commenter · Hacker News ↗ · Aug 12
“I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" and I think this entire concept really blurs the lines and feels sort of unserious. Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains.”
insanitybit, Hacker News commenter · Hacker News ↗ · Aug 12
“This blog post annoys me a little. Not the post itself - it's great - but how it has been used to prop up thousands of lazy arguments against innovations over the years.”
rienbdj, Hacker News commenter · Hacker News ↗ · Aug 12
“Software that works year-after-year has never been a commodity. It's boring on the surface. It doesn't get the flashy posts. But I'll choose reliable over new in almost all cases.”
euthymiclabs, Hacker News commenter · Hacker News ↗ · Aug 12
The conversation unedited, verbatim
237 comments claimed on the threads · 14 collected here from 2 sites · 12 voices below over time ↑
Where people stand verbatim
The Hacker News thread splits between engineers who treat the innovation tokens concept as a foundational leadership tool and those who see it as an imprecise heuristic that has been misused to block change. The newer voices grapple with whether the framework still applies in an AI-driven world where agent capability might dominate other concerns.
The dispute Whether the innovation tokens framework is a rigorous decision-making tool or a convenient metaphor that obscures the harder work of case-by-case technical evaluation.
Innovation tokens is a practical and proven framework for engineering leaders to make sound tradeoffs and communicate them across levels.
-
“This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career.”
NickNaraghi · Hacker News ↗ -
“Software that works year-after-year has never been a commodity. It's boring on the surface. It doesn't get the flashy posts. But I'll choose reliable over new in almost all cases.”
euthymiclabs · Hacker News ↗
The innovation tokens framework is a useful metaphor for the modern AI era; teams should spend tokens on agents while keeping underlying tech mature and in-distribution for better model performance.
-
“Using the language of the article, I'd say "push all your innovation tokens into agents" is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech.”
theptip · Hacker News ↗
Innovation tokens is an arbitrary and imprecise heuristic that obscures real analysis of requirements, risks, and tradeoffs; novelty should not be a proxy for evaluation.
-
“I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" and I think this entire concept really blurs the lines and feels sort of unserious. Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains.”
insanitybit · Hacker News ↗
The essay itself is sound, but it has been weaponized over a decade to lazily justify rejecting innovations.
-
“This blog post annoys me a little. Not the post itself - it's great - but how it has been used to prop up thousands of lazy arguments against innovations over the years.”
rienbdj · Hacker News ↗
- Does the innovation tokens framework still apply when AI agents can handle much of the operational complexity of new technologies?
- How can engineering leaders distinguish between legitimate innovation that merits spending a token and misguided adoption of novelty for its own sake?
- Yesterday
-
One theory these days might be that old, boring technology is better represented in the training data for AI models...
-
This blog post annoys me a little. Not the post itself - it’s great - but how it has been used to prop up thousands of lazy arguments against innovations over the years.
-
Well, I've not tried to publish this on HN so far, but I guess given such a counterpoint, I should at least attempt to share:
-
Choose Boring Technology (2015) Link: https:// mcfunley.com/choose-boring-tec hnology Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9289512
-
Some of this may have been a reaction to the era of Javascript framework churn. There were way too many different technologies for doing roughly the same job. They all more or less worked.On the other hand, IBM was late getting into integrated circuits. They had Solid Logic Technology, automated machinery for putting transistors into ceramic…
-
I'll push back against this, despite it being so popular. I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" and I think this entire concept really blurs the lines and feels sort of unserious.Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains. New technology may be right for that. Novel approaches may be right for that…
-
🌗 選擇無聊的技術 ➤ 降低系統維運風險與技術債的務實決策指南 ✤ https:// mcfunley.com/choose-boring-tec hnology 本文提倡在軟體開發與架構設計中優先選擇「無聊」但成熟穩定的技術。作者提出「創新代幣」的概念，指出企業的技術創新資源極為有限，應將其保留給核心業務，而非浪費在維運不確定性極高的新興技術上。透過建立全域優化的思維，以及嚴格評估「若不引進新技術該如何解決問題」的審查機制，團隊能大幅降低認知負擔與長期維護成本，確保系統在可預期的風險下穩定運行。 + 這篇文章真的點醒了我！以前總想著在專案裡嘗試最新的框架和資料庫，結果最後花在解決奇葩 Bug…
-
I love this post. It’s also interesting to revisit in the age of agents.Using the language of the article, I’d say “push all your innovation tokens into agents” is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech.Another way of saying this is “use in-distribution technology”. If agents are substantially…
-
Love this post. Surprisingly controversial; it hasn't made me very many engineering friends.
-
There was another, much older, post similar to this about, I think, "beans" that engineers use to solve problems. If I remember correctly, it was something like, solving a problem costs "beans", and engineers will always use most all of their "beans" to solve a given problem, because it's somewhat "easy" until you run out of them.Maybe it wasn't…
-
Software that works year-after-year has never been a commodity. It's boring on the surface. It doesn't get the flashy posts. But I'll choose reliable over new in almost all cases.
-
> Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while.This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career. It helps…