How will the user know the computer worked 'HARD', if it is not slow?

Do you not add sleep to your programs?

the slowest part of most software is still the part where a human has to wait for a build to finish before they can remember what they were doing

There never was. We had software that felt snappy on 90's hardware

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's no reason" being very different than "we can now do the thing easier". There are still tons of reasons for software to be slow, the biggest of which is priorities.

If you want your software to be fast, stop writing it in Python and TypeScript and instead write it in Go, Rust, C++ or C. But nobody's going to do that, because humans are emotional creatures who get attached to things (like programming languages). Or if you want your software to be fast, stop spending your time and money (tokens) on features, and start spending it on profiling log replays to find a bottleneck causing a 50ms delay for the 95th percentile. But nobody's going to do that either, because how slow is too slow? Answer: when it's slow enough to scare the shareholders or annoy the developer on their high-powered laptop.

If you want faster/more efficient software, force it to run on a 100MHz CPU with 512KB RAM and a 56k modem. You'll definitely prioritize speed then.

Incentive has shifted. It’s now more important to worry about “developer productivity” and churning out as much code as quickly as possible than it is to spend time optimizing that code.

With RAM becoming expensive, developers will have no choice but to make memory efficient software.

I recently built a piece of code which downloads a bulk set of data, indexes it for search, and then serves a pretty web UI on top of this with the help of some AIs. Normally I would have reached for sstables, sqlite, etc. This time, because the lookup patterns actually would not have been too efficient on sstables and SQLite would have been overkill, I had an agent take the data structures, pack the text effectively, and build a prefix tree for fast auto completion from the search bar. It was great. I could have done this all before but I wouldn't have. I would have felt sqlite was fast enough. The resulting web server is significantly faster feeling (because the optimized lookup speeds) than an sqlite implementation would feel like.

I think engineers building very complex systems now have a lot of performance knobs to twiddle that would have just been too costly for human effort. Since we constrain the responsibilities of the agent slop is less of a problem. We relegate it to defined tasks with clear API boundaries and test harnesses.

There's also no reason for body text spanning the whole width of my 24 inch display.

i can pore all my time, agents running profiling, workloads and so but no one gives a damn. tried the whole year, still do for my personal projects