ECD — Extreme Co-Design
Design philosophy for achieving superlinear gains through full-stack simultaneous optimization of shared surfaces. Originated at Nvidia for hardware; translated here to software engineering.
Documents
| # | Document | Contents |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Extreme Co-Design | Philosophy, evidence, core principles — what it is and why it works |
| 02 | Software Translation | What surfaces, temporal discipline, and organizational mandates mean for software |
| 03 | FCA + ECD Synthesis | How FCA operationalizes ECD — the dependency DAG, composition theorem, gate tests |
Reading order
Quick start: Read the thesis in 01, then jump to 03 for the synthesis with FCA.
Full argument: Read in order. Each document builds on the previous.
Core claim
Performance gains are not additive across independently optimized layers — they are multiplicative when layers are co-optimized across their shared surfaces. The interface between components is more important than the implementation within them.