alt Hacker NewsYou not only leave performance on the table (which depending on your use case/environment, may not matter if you can just throw more threads at it) but also some developer ergonomics.
asyncio.gather is a lot less code than having to manage a thread pool or something like Celery with all it's underlying infrastructure.
If you're in an ecosystem where a lot of the async boilerplate is free/cheap (ex: FastAPI) then the developer overhead of sprinkling awaits on your I/O bound calls is pretty low IMO.
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Performance aside (which I would argue is premature optimization, as most programs will not feel the theoretical overhead of threads), async is a bad approach for developer ergonomics. Threads are so much easier to work with and reason about than async. There are reasons to use async (like if you're in the rare case when thread overhead is noticeable), but developer ergonomics are absolutely not a reason.
> something like Celery with all it's underlying infrastructure.
Unpopular opinion, but combining this with the other "no thanks" sentiments in this subthread is the right answer. Your app is so complicated you need async? Then it's complicated enough that you can benefit from infrastructure. I don't want to watch coworkers try to badly rebuild message queue or scheduling semantics in an application code base. Just use infrastructure that's made by people who know what they are doing. That was problematic in 2015, but in 2026 it's a bit of docker, and it's not just about web/microservices. Very easy for sufficiently complex apps to simply leverage a local sandbox of celery, redis, graphdb's and whatever. Stand-alone is overrated since we don't have to do it anymore.. app devs should get more comfortable working with ensembles like this so they have access to best-in-class solutions.
You don't like infrastructure AND have such a need for performance AND don't want threads or multiprocess? Consider using another language. Async is mostly a solution in search of a problem, and the enduring popularity of TFA goes to show this has been the right conclusion for ~10 years.