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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

danluu.com

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Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#31

Post by tekne »

jeffbee wrote: post #22

Eh, not sure. Very few humans do software optimization productively, so I'm not optimistic about machines built by humans, either. Every encounter I've had with agentic optimization involved trying to apply a bunch of myths to an existing code base, in a way that seemed cool (unrolling loops, eliminating apparent branches, SIMD) but which was all pointless because the only credible optimizations were going to come fr…

Data point of one, but after a few months of uselessness, I have managed to get some pretty serious, measurable performance improvements with AI optimizations -- order-of-magnitude speedups of business critical processes which took days as well as significant latency reductions.

But you need a really solid workflow, solid benchmarks which run quickly, and a lot of tokens -- plus a rigorous profiling workflow.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#32

Post by jaggederest »

tobinfekkes wrote: post #3

Wow, my browser's Reader Mode saved my bacon on this one. Otherwise, I would have left immediately. I'm all for speedy, simple, plaintext websites, but it is a negligible amount of work in 2026 to throw some barebones CSS in and make it approachable.

Ironically a perfect thing to iterate on with your favorite coding agent. "make this page look better, present me 2 versions, I'll pick my favorite, and we'll iterate until I say stop"

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#33

Post by markdown »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #27
beyonddream wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why you got downvoted but you have a point. It looks as if OP doesn’t write for readership and his posts contents have similar characteristics of reckless abandon for conventional norms for a tech post. Too many cross references and link-backs to his own other articles that makes it really hard to follow the main thread of the essay.

Dan Luu is a bit famous around HN. I think he might subscribe to the philosophy of everyone should style websites however they like and not be prescribed by the author.

Nah, he's just trying to be different. It's vanity.

He's had a usable website in the past. This one is explicitly made to be shitty. "Look at me, I'm such a geek" energy.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#34

Post by pdimitar »

panny wrote: post #21

>LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly LLMs have caused such an increase in ram prices that pine64 is no longer making linux machines. When you can't afford RAM, as a direct result of LLMs, it's going to make your assembly app slower too. Sorry, this is the future you chose.

[flagged]

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#35

Post by SadErn »

newsomix9xl wrote: post #14

One 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.

I feel like I’m reading a post from 2025 instead of one written three minutes ago.

People get entrenched in closedminded thinking. My guess is that this has been your canned spasm for the past year. Repeating these things won’t make them true or protect your job.

You protect your job by learning how to use new tools as the technology advances.

This sort of lazy thinking isn’t acceptable anymore. Whether this is a reflexive Luddite response or a reflection of your work ethic, neither is a good look.

> Yet when I ask for code

Engineers don't ask a tool to write code.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#37

Post by privong »

beyonddream wrote: post #23
tobinfekkes wrote: post #3

Wow, my browser's Reader Mode saved my bacon on this one. Otherwise, I would have left immediately. I'm all for speedy, simple, plaintext websites, but it is a negligible amount of work in 2026 to throw some barebones CSS in and make it approachable.

I don’t know why you got downvoted but you have a point. It looks as if OP doesn’t write for readership and his posts contents have similar characteristics of reckless abandon for conventional norms for a tech post. Too many cross references and link-backs to his own other articles that makes it really hard to follow the main thread of the essay.

The downvotes may be related to community enforcing what's in the HN guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#38

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

"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.

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