who is Jamie Brandon
There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
11–20 of 530 posts
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's not built with client side optimization in mind any more. It's built with circular investment in mind. Big tech funds startups (through obfuscated legal and financial means) and that funding goes straight back into big tech cloud hosting and SaaS services.
Isn't this just enshittification? Where money is the driver, enshittification is just bound to happen.
If that euphemism makes sense of it for you, sure.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#13Well, at least with the RAM crunch that the AI boom has caused, I hope there will be some sort of pressure to write efficient software, otherwise device manufacturers are quite fucked.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#14One article said secure software was here because of AI, this one says it can now be performant.
Yet when I ask for code it writes, by default, both slow and insecure code that mostly works. Kinda.
As I try to get AI to rewrite it into more secure, less bloated and optimized code is when it starts to randomly crash.
Then I read articles about how AI is "moving too fast" and cry.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#15This 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
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#16100% sure software in the coming years will just feel slower and slower.
I’m a lot more optimistic now that RAM is scarce. A lot of focus will be on maximizing software performance.
See: iOS 27. It’s faster than the previous version, even on very old phones.
I also think AI will contribute to removing a lot of the tedium surrounding optimization.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#17But software seems to be getting slower and less user friendly by the hour.
Both can be true.
AI SDLCs simply compress the same incentives that were always there: you could invest in optimizing your architecture and improving your UX, neither of which make for big bullet points that close sales, or you could invest in new features that do.
The investment that was previously measured in months of developer time may now be measured in token spend across days, but the underlying dynamics shaping where it’s directed haven’t changed.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#18Well, at least with the RAM crunch that the AI boom has caused, I hope there will be some sort of pressure to write efficient software, otherwise device manufacturers are quite fucked.
Yah, maybe $1k/dimm on 32 dimm system is a slight price bump.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#19I 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.
Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
#20100% sure software in the coming years will just feel slower and slower.
It will be the equivalent of that Excel =COPILOT(“sum the numbers above”) meme.