alt Hacker News>Programming is done in a world of pure though, in a sense, so most of the friction already lives in your head
It seems that way, but that's not actually true. A fully greased-up brain would produce just incoherent nonsense decoupled from reality, because it would lack all constraints that would allow it to judge the value of an idea (i.e. how possible and useful it would be to implement in the real world). The friction comes from fitting your ideas into the real world.
>They reduced friction wherever they could so that they got the most work done that they could with the least amount of distraction.
They reduced unnecessary friction. They could have eliminated all friction by imagining a teleporter machine that can send you anywhere instantly and that runs on the hopes of children. But they still wanted the friction of unsuccessful attempts so they could actually build a plane that worked.
Your concluding example doesn't make sense to me but I think that it's because we have different definitions for what friction means here. It's also kind of hard to define in context.
I would say that, within the Wright Brothers example, working with a battered, worn-out screwdriver is an example of friction (or, perhaps having to use a bit and brace instead of a power drill), but the act of building a new unsuccessful airplane iteration is not friction. Every build is asking physics for feedback on the design; every airplane build is just the same as running your code through the compiler. I wish I had a good word to distinguish this from friction. The closest thing I can imagine is how waste is defined in Lean Manufacturing, but keeping in mind that what you are manufacturing is Ideas and Software.