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Era of Bloated Software Is Over

news.ycombinator.com

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Era of Bloated Software Is Over

#1
The bloated internet with laggy, slow websites is coming to an end. Over time, it’ll drastically decrease, and once again, average sites will load fast, render smoothly, and have fewer unnecessary animations.

You might ask why ?

Let me give you a simple example:

Say a developer is creating a button that increases in width by 3% on hover, with smooth transition. Right now, most designers/UI devs would just slap on framer-motion without thinking, which increases the load and build time of that component. But it could be done using just default Tailwind classes.

Now in the case of AI platforms if they have the option to use motion vs raw Tailwind classes, they will (or should) take the Tailwind route. Why? Because these AI companies rent a lot of GPU to render the UI, and using framer-motion will costs more than just using plain Tailwind bcs more build time equal to more money spent on gpu.

And the positive side effect of this?

We’ll start seeing more optimized code. And since a lot of devs are lazy (let’s be real), they’ll directly paste whatever they get from the platform. So that’s a good side effect.

Re: Era of Bloated Software Is Over

#3
> Because these AI companies rent a lot of GPU to render the UI

What AI company is rendering websites for me on their GPUs?

> We’ll start seeing more optimized code.

No. We'll see more AI-generated code. AI-generated code is derived from human generated code. Most human generated code is slow (see: your own title).

Re: Era of Bloated Software Is Over

#7
> And since a lot of devs are lazy (let’s be real), they’ll directly paste whatever they get from the platform.

If so, there will be a zillion slightly different ways to do foo in the code base. I don’t see how that would decrease bloat.

Asking the LLM to reduce code duplication might help a bit, but (call me a pessimist) I think it will introduce subtle bugs, too.

Re: Era of Bloated Software Is Over

#9
post #8

Web bloat is coming from every angle, including - surprise - LLM's. So no, I don't think it's over. Also wdym AI companies rendering UI? You mean the chatgpt textbox?

No like UI generator platform Like lovable, Bolt and V0 they all use GPU in background in order to render thi UI

Re: Era of Bloated Software Is Over

#10

LLM generated code is legacy code and we're having it generated at increasingly fast rates. The bloat in software is undergoing a step change increase, not decrease.

In just five years, we have advanced LLMs to the point where they can already generate production level code. Yes, sometimes the output contains bloat, but isn’t it our responsibility to ensure it doesn’t? We can easily address that with good prompting, fine tuning and code context with little human intervention. Considering how far we have come in just five years, imagine what these models will be capable of in the future. Im confident that in another five years, LLMs will be so advanced that theywill generate less and less bloated code over time and adapt itself according to our need.
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