Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 264 posts

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#91

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

thewebguyd wrote: post #78
devmor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Stop doing stupid stuff” is usually the biggest performance gain in commercial development. We do stupid stuff as a stopgap to meet a deadline and then stupid stuff stays until it starts being a problem.

There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix. If deadlines are causing those stopgaps, the aggressive deadlines are the root problem.

> There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.

That should be one of those Tech culture “laws.”

I suspect that the dependapocalyse is a significant factor. When every part of an operation has multiple context rebuilds, and resources are not shared across module boundaries, you get inefficient behavior.

But I’m skeptical that there’s a will to rethink that.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#92

Post by elcritch »

thewebguyd wrote: post #79
inigyou wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a single example of a successful LLM project apart from Claude Code?

If the CEOs are to be believed, then 75% of all new code in Google is AI generated. 46% of GitHub internal code, and roughly 30% across all of Microsoft is AI. Meta expects at least 65%, and snap reported 65% is AI generated. Its how software is built now in these palces.

Unfortunately doesn’t answer the question “successful LLM project”.

From what I’ve seen of GitHub and AWS this year the answer is no. That’s despite me being bullish on LLMs and finding them highly productive.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#94

Post by reinitctxoffset »

Depends entirely on how competitive / adversarial the market segment is. And there are wild nonlinearities, just as you care a lot whether or not something fits in an 8-way set associative L1d but once you're too big or bank conflicted to make it the cost model drops sharply until you're about to spill the L2.

The hackers doing the drone software in Ukraine will go to enormous lengths to get something onto Jetson Orin, but once it needs Thor? New cost model.

I think what the parent might be asking is whether the cost of DRAM will be passed along to the most powerless actor in the system, and that depends on whether it's a real competition (war, HFT) or a pillow fight between frenemies (consumer Internet, too big to fail AI lab).

Us liberals have this quaint idea that good referees make capitalism an adversarial contest instead of a rolodex contest, but that idea is out of fashion at the moment.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#95

Post by aabdi »

elcritch wrote: post #92
thewebguyd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the CEOs are to be believed, then 75% of all new code in Google is AI generated. 46% of GitHub internal code, and roughly 30% across all of Microsoft is AI. Meta expects at least 65%, and snap reported 65% is AI generated. Its how software is built now in these palces.

Unfortunately doesn’t answer the question “successful LLM project”. From what I’ve seen of GitHub and AWS this year the answer is no. That’s despite me being bullish on LLMs and finding them highly productive.

https://blog.joemag.dev/2025/10/the-new-calculus-of-ai-based...?

in aws, some of the core bedrock services have been replaced with the new serving architecture. that thing was written basically with LLMs.

mind you, guy's a distinguished engineer, his team was basically all principals, but you can do it and some of the new teams are copying the style (though with less success, due to lack of technical skill).

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#97

Post by holoduke »

Yes. Let's hope bloated frameworks like react, angular and vue with their dreaded hydration and ssr approaches will be replaced with pure clientside applications with stateless servers with small data apis only. That alone will reduce zeptibytes of memory requirements in the world.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#99

Post by devmor »

timacles wrote: post #87
thewebguyd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix. If deadlines are causing those stopgaps, the aggressive deadlines are the root problem.

Honestly, after years of seeing this play out, a lot of devs really lack the judgement to know when something is good enough to deliver and will endlessly delay projects to “ do the right thing”

Absolutely. It’s one of the defining characteristics of what makes someone a capable senior in the role IMO.

I have known a lot of extremely talented developers, some with more technical skill than me, that simply failed at their job because they couldn’t come to terms with the fact that their job isn’t to produce the most perfect code possible for the problem.

Re: Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?

#100

Post by FridgeSeal »

thewebguyd wrote: post #79
inigyou wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a single example of a successful LLM project apart from Claude Code?

If the CEOs are to be believed, then 75% of all new code in Google is AI generated. 46% of GitHub internal code, and roughly 30% across all of Microsoft is AI. Meta expects at least 65%, and snap reported 65% is AI generated. Its how software is built now in these palces.

Given the uhhh, quality and issues GitHub and Microslop have been exhibiting recently, that’s probably not a great indicator.
Post reply on HN