There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

I wonder if AI has changed the 90% rate. From my perspective it’s already increased the ratio of what I’d consider bad.

I haven’t seen as big of an impact on the “good” side. People with attention to detail and craft can use it with great results but they’re not pumping things out at the speed of the slip slingers.

> iykyk

A story.

I have a friend, who is - like me - interested in the CRDT / collaborative editing space. He asked ChatGPT to write him a CRDT. Then he grabbed every good CRDT implementation, and asked chatgpt to benchmark and optimise his CRDT, using tricks and techniques from existing hand-optimised CRDTs. He got massive performance gains by doing this - which is really interesting! I think it helped that he had a clear objective function, and chatgpt could look at other projects for ideas on how to optimise.

He proudly boasted that his resulting code outperformed my diamond-types library. I asked him if he was comparing against the native implementation, or the -Oz webassembly build, running in a wasm vm. It was the latter. When he tested it properly, his CRDT was - and is - significantly slower than diamond types. As far as I know, chatgpt still hasn't been able to catch up. I tried myself using fable. Even with reference to my source code, Fable still doesn't understand what I did in diamond types and why. (... Maybe I should document what I did!)

I think his technique itself is solid though. I tried it myself. I asked fable to write a custom binary serialization format & parser. Then optimise. Then optimise, with explicit reference to existing libraries. Optimising with reference to other code made a huge additional difference. It is now nearly as fast as those libraries. (But still not faster than them.)

My takeaway is this: I think LLMs are exceptionally good at reading and understanding code. If you guide them to do so, they're good at profiling and benchmarking. But it seems like they're not very good at coming up with novel optimisations. If you have an obviously slow program (for example, some slop claude wrote), you can often get big speedups by asking it to benchmark and optimise. But if you have a complex, already well optimised codebase, like the zig compiler, claude doesn't seem very good at figuring out novel ways to improve things on its own.

This is good news for the 95% of slow software out there. But bad news for the 5% of us who write fast code already, but want our code to go even faster.

I gave Fable 5 access to the database and the browser and asked it to optimize for performance.

Woke up today with 2x improvement and fully tested.

The code optimized was mostly written by humans over the years. That code was too cumbersome to optimize by humans so we never touched it.

The reason for using Electron is to write once and run everywhere right?

I get that LLMs would make it faster to write distinct copies for different operating systems and maintain them both but thats still more costly than a single system.

Sorry if I’m misunderstanding the goal of Electron but it still seems cheaper and easier (although admittedly worse than multiple native apps)

To do the best they can do within the confines of what's politically acceptable. There's an intersection near me that is just horrendous, but the engineer I talked to, who is now retired, said it was his mentor's task to fix it some 50 years ago. Actually fixing it, though, would require removing parking spaces, and the mayors have routinely vetoed that idea after they received pushback.

The people are to blame. You get what you vote for.