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Related, a famous example of how "doing nothing" can be a surprisingly difficult problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEFBR14

I like the story of how Grep is fast because it tries to do as little work as possible.

Your example doesn't obviously support this, but reminded me of Mark Twain's

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

Actually Blaise Pascal's, from Provincial Letters XVI.