Top
Best
New

Posted by Jach 18 hours ago

There's no reason for software to be slow anymore(danluu.com)
594 points | 448 commentspage 4
killbot5000 17 hours ago|
As long as there’s a trade off between experimentation and performance, software will always be slightly too slow.
phtrivier 11 hours ago|
And now the other aspect of the trade off is token budget allocation.

The author seems to be in a situation where you can burn as many token as you want. I don't know if that's a general situation.

(Even if you don't care about the environment impact of your computations, there is a dollar bill associated, and _someone_ cares very much about that.)

I can foresee a situation where devs will have to decide on how they allocate a fixed token budget - and then, faced with the option of "burning tokens to add a new feature requested by a customer for tomorrow's demo" or "burning tokens to maybe make the app faster in some edge case", the trade off will look a lot like the ones organisations made with human dev time.

This assumes that tokens are not going to get dramatically cheaper. I can't predict the future, but I don't see a path to that (or, are local models, and "a TPU in every machine" going to make the question irrelevant?).

I can definitely see a path were tokens get massively more expensive (let's meet six months after anthropic's IPO and check :D)

0xblinq 15 hours ago||
There's no reason for sites to look super ugly, full width and unreadable anymore.
shoopadoop 17 hours ago||
In my experience AI coding is often about making lots of additive changes without a lot of (or any) thinking in advance.

Not sure how either of those things are conducive to performance

dvh 10 hours ago||
Slow software is solved problem. Just give all developers Celeron J3455.
ozim 11 hours ago||
Yes I do understand what author wrote as I read the whole thing, but I argue that title is not universally true.

Like we have OLAP and OLTP, there are still batch jobs that need to happen before you can see your dashboard, we have multiple users using the same resources, there are still DB Locks when writing needed, there are "first load" issues

— heck now we have to compete for resources with even more bots than ever.

Transferring 10GB or 1TB of data still not going to be instant laws of physics still apply.

4lx87 17 hours ago||
Jevon's paradox implies we're getting more fast software, and more slow software. Sturgeon’s law implies the ratio will remain the same. 90% of what ships will be slow, buggy, slop. Just as it was before LLMs.
dandellion 12 hours ago||
I think this is the most accurate take on this thread. I've written super optimised code in assembly and SIMD. But only for contests never at work, because I've never had an employer that cared to optimise things that far, they just wanted cheap software that worked just good enough to get the job done. Even in places where they actually cared about quality would usually prefer adding a couple features over optimising things that much.
paulhebert 15 hours ago||
I wonder if AI has changed the 90% rate. From my perspective it’s already increased the ratio of what I’d consider bad.

I haven’t seen as big of an impact on the “good” side. People with attention to detail and craft can use it with great results but they’re not pumping things out at the speed of the slip slingers.

aurareturn 15 hours ago||
I gave Fable 5 access to the database and the browser and asked it to optimize for performance.

Woke up today with 2x improvement and fully tested.

The code optimized was mostly written by humans over the years. That code was too cumbersome to optimize by humans so we never touched it.

amarant 13 hours ago||
I was thinking about this the other day, but along a slightly different path. I realised there is no need to use web technology to provide native experiences anymore. Bundling a web browser was always a way to ship native apps to multiple platforms with minimal effort, but these days prompting up an actual native client for each platform is already accessible even to small shops!

That's probably one of the biggest sources of software slowness, and we can just stop using it now, with almost no trade-off. Neat!

anon-3988 15 hours ago||
Yes, simply stop using JavaScript and give me static webpages. Done. I don't give a fuck if your website have a nice effect that follows my cursor, I just think about the amount of energy, effort and time wasted on making this demo.

See https://deepseek.com/harness/en/

Is anyone really impressed by this gimmick anymore? Just give me a blank HTML with <table>. Its fine. I dont think anyone care.

radium3d 15 hours ago|
Sites can be fast with PHP and JavaScript. The slowness you see is mostly coming from all the frameworks too many developers "include" willy nilly with code that can only be described as bloat because 99% of it is completely unused, yet being loaded and computed by the browser on every load. That's what you're experiencing on too many websites.
rfgplk 13 hours ago||
Funnily enough, since most JS frameworks are utter junk, developers are better off instructing LLMs to write pure JS instead.

Fun story, I was writing some 3D graphics animations for a website, and the only dependency I allowed was three.js. It ran well, but the site was loading slightly too slow so I told the LLM to optimize. It essentially hit a hard wall and told me something along the lines of "I can't optimize further, three.js is the bottleneck due to blablabla, but you don't need it. If you want I can rewrite it with pure WebGL". I said sure and load times were cut by like 90% and framerate went up too. Staggering.

radium3d 2 hours ago||
Exactly, that is definitely a better route. Just instruct your agent to not use any external dependencies for the request.
nemothekid 17 hours ago|
This makes sense for a verifiable task like a regex engine - but those are clearly defined and I doubt an LLM will have a meaningful speed increase over current human regex engines.

Anything else kind of just feels like "make GTA 6, make no mistakes". The ability for you to write fast and correct software is really going to depend on well you can specify your problem, and having the ability to specify correct programs in such detail an LLM can reasonably performance tune it is a big enough reason for me to believe there will still be slow software

More comments...