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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

#41

Post by jongjong »

> performance work that used to require a person or team that had a rare set of skills can be done by anyone who can type a few sentences

This idea is the reason why software will keep getting slower and less reliable. Because it's wrong and yet people believe it.

Not only do people believe this, even if they didn't, they would still have the problem that most people (including many engineers) are bad at telling who is a good software engineer.

So this means that code will get worse and worse; less performant, less reliable, less secure.

It will be impossible to fix because nobody would know what the problems are let alone identify who is able to solve those problems.

I don't know how bad it has to get before people understand we have to rebuild everything from scratch on much more rigid guardrails.

The essence of the problem is that the LLM does exactly what you tell it. In the hands of a skilled engineer who understands the project, this is a superpower. In the hands of a junior, this is dangerous... Because it will do things that are insecure; it doesn't push back on a user request; it just goes ahead and tries to make it work, even if it's a bad idea and the problem is best solved in a different way.

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

#42

Post by moron4hire »

y1n0 wrote: post #29
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.

It's all about the test suite. The test suite becomes an executable specification, and the better the spec, the better the results you can get from AI.

If you have such a test suite then you really don't need AI to write the code for you.

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

#43

Post by senderista »

Grombobulous wrote: post #16
raincole wrote: post #10

100% 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.

It fucking better be faster, iOS 26 basically bricked my iPhone SE, which had never been the slightest bit laggy or glitchy before that cursed update.

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

#44

Post by ehnto »

One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it.

Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick.

If your software has the affordance of a waiting dialogue or loading wheel for many of its UI controls, you are building with this default blocked assumption. Even if you are building something web based, ask yourself if that's actually necessary for your software or if you could build it differently to avoid constant UI blocking.

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

#45

Post by tom_ »

markdown wrote: post #33
phist_mcgee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His site has always looked like this, i'm sure of it. This is what sites look like if you just write them as text. Not everybody knows how to use sql or css or java or whatever thing it is that lets you pick the font.

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

#46

Post by senderista »

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.

You must not look at many academic websites.

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

#47

Post by an0malous »

rochak wrote: post #9
stopIiiiit wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

The private equity and venture capitalist playbook has always been enshittification: you either take an existing high quality product or innovate one subsidized with investment capital, then once it’s time to flip the business you 10x the price and cut costs (which usually cuts quality).

AI is the perfect tool for enshittification, because it can get you 80% of a finished product with a fraction of the costs it used to take, but the last 20% takes 2-5x times longer. So you just ignore the last 20%, make it up in volume by producing 100 mediocre products instead of 1 great one.

And that’s basically the state of the tech industry right now. I don’t think it’ll be like this forever, I think there will be better ways to collaborate with AI rather than wholesale delegation and prompting. But for now we’re stuck with mass enshittifation. People who have no sense of quality, taste, or craftsmanship don’t even understand, they skim over some generic blog post from Claude that takes five paragraphs to say one thing or watch the Coca Cola AI ad and don’t event notice it’s a different train in every shot and they think it’s so amazing. I hope this isn’t just the way things are now.

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

#48

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

Feel like this is the equivalent of a traffic engineer standing at the grand opening of the 5th lane for the highway saying there’s no reason for traffic to be slow anymore.

That is, there’s a misunderstanding of why software (traffic) was slow in the first place, and it has nothing to do with our ability to generate code (number of lanes), even if that code is “high quality”.

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

#49

Post by jongjong »

y1n0 wrote: post #29
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.

It's all about the test suite. The test suite becomes an executable specification, and the better the spec, the better the results you can get from AI.

It's part of it but you need good systems thinking in order to write good tests. The kind of thinking which requires years of software engineering experience to acquire.

Also the architecture really matters now because a poor architecture will lead to more weird edge cases and require more exotic tests to plug all the holes.

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