Good read. I liked the point that even small performance improvements can be useful if they don’t take much time to find and test. But measuring the actual impact is still important.

Great news, let's just wait an eternity for this myth to morph into reality!

Then there was no reason it took almost a year for Anthropic to find a workaround for a bit of screen flickering, right?

Not paying for premium? That's still a good reason. Even solo SaaS builders have to pay the rent.

Someone please tell me why a modern portable digital music player takes at least 10x as long to start up than its equivalent of 25 years ago.

There was never any reason for it to be slow in the first place, yet here we are. In my view, we have slow software not because knowledge of optimization comes at a premium, in fact, most compilers do well enough at optimization that you can rely on them for at least acceptable levels of performance, assuming you choose effective algorithms for the task. Software is slow because other incentives are stronger than performance, and people more often make sets of technical choices that produce slowness (for example, opting for ease of development and portability over performance (see electron)).

I don't think LLMs are going to change this. They won't change what companies and individuals value. Yes, they can enable those interested in performance to write even more performant software, more easily, but they won't convince the people who aren't prioritizing performance in the first place to prioritize performance. This ship sailed a long time ago.

Performance was prioritized when it was necessary due to resource limitations. As soon as those lifted, performance was deprioritized in favor of other properties. I doubt the balance will really be restored until limitations re-emerge or consumers put pressure on companies around performance. Unfortunately, the past few years have shown that the latter is unlikely to work.

>you can choose how many bugs you want now,

You are a rust expert. Make only 5 mistakes.

:) Interesting quote though - I guess one does get to decide how much testing/debugging effort one wants now

Dan Luu might benefit from having an LLM optimize his website for readability.

This needs to be qualified with "to the degree that you have a specification of what that software should do." The better the spec, the more leeway you can give the optimizer. A very thorough spec lets you give the LLM total free rein to run optimization passes over your codebase.