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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

#511

Post by cavem0nkey »

sgarland wrote: post #507
ryandrake wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not letting the developers entirely off the hook. At many companies, they are decision makers too, and partially share the blame with their product leadership and other decision makers. Unpopular Opinion, but if you have absolutely zero say in the content of what you're developing, and just take orders from JIRA, you shouldn't call yourself an engineer. You should also keep your eyes open for a better job.

Agreed. Plus, if you can get an entire team to tell the PM “this is fucking stupid, we aren’t doing it,” what are they gonna do - axe an entire team? I doubt it. Maybe at big companies, but small ones? Nah.

Realistically companies just start an outsourcing operation if this happens and employ people who live in fear for pittance.

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

#512

Post by IshKebab »

punarinta wrote: post #501
IshKebab wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's my point. Maybe AI will lower that cost to the point where it makes sense to write e.g. a native Slack app. I dunno, we'll see.

There is a native Slack client actually. Fast and with good feature coverage, it’s called msga.app

Aha exactly what I was talking about. Vibe coded in a few months. Maybe it has slop bugs but if you have as many employees as Slack it shouldn't be that hard to whip into shape. There's no excuse for Slack not having done this themselves.

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

#513

Post by VladVladikoff »

jjcm wrote: post #122
VladVladikoff wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was for https://non.io Maybe hugged but feels really sluggish to me for it is.

These are the stats I'm seeing: https://image.non.io/7a8adcb1-2a17-4e2c-b213-d0c3e173a1d5.we... Should note the server is on USW and I don't have edge servers for it at the moment.

https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-non-io/6mtvojtvvy?f... Quite slow imho

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

#514

Post by markdown »

duskdozer wrote: post #249
markdown wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm almost certain he used to have a reasonably styled website. I just tried to look it up but it looks like he's excluded the website from WayBackMachine. > Not everybody knows how to use sql or css or java or whatever thing it is that lets you pick the font. lol at the idea that Dan Luu can't add css to his website by copypasting some links into his html. He could make the site readable in about 3 mins and never ha…

Honestly I prefer the minimal style because I add my own to many pages as it is, or use the built-in reader or a reader extension. People have much different opinions on what's readable.

> People have much different opinions on what's readable.

Opinions are dime a dozen, but readability (and usability in general) is a well-studied field and having to move your head from side to side to read text that stretches the width of a screen is objectively bad for readability. That's just one example.

And making the website readable for the majority does not prevent one from using the built-in reader or an extension.

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

#515

Post by mawadev »

ck45 wrote: post #411
mawadev wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could go on about this all day. Best meme is when you estimate stories for storypoints and then they haggle with you without changing the content of the story. Meanwhile points mean actual time. Then on another side if you haggled down points, you then have more slots for more points. So you end up getting assigned 3x work for the same time. The blame game starts when the sprints elapse lmao

Storypoints do not mean "time". Time would be too concrete and measurable and would be bad for selling more agile coachings. Instead storypoints represent "effort". What does it mean and how can it be used to estimate a shipping date? I was told that I just don't understand.

One customer pulled billing by storypoints, loved this one

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

#517

Post by villish »

bigtechennui wrote: post #402
ehnto wrote: post #44

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 wait…

There’s no reason for (most) software to just be hosted in the US anymore. We as an industry should use AI to enable a standard of software quality that was previously uneconomical.

Such as? There are alternatives to almost anything you can think of already. All popular sites and services have clones. What more do you want?

The issue I think you’ll run into is that they’re lacking users and kind of just worse versions. Usually because people who say things like this, don’t actually want to be personally inconvenienced to switch.

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

#518

Post by hombre_fatal »

tomveber wrote: post #278
hombre_fatal wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, performance and security considerations can be automated by a reusable harness and I think within six months it will just be built in to things like claude code and codex the same way you might tack on a performance/security section to your project's AGENTS.md. A crude example is how, when building a large forum project years ago, I had a checklist I ran on every new http route: authentication, authorizati…

The checklist half automates cleanly, you can lint that every route calls authorize. It won't catch authorize being handed the wrong policy, which is the one that ships. And when I put a second model on review duty, the common failure is it agreeing with the first model's misreading of the spec, almost word for word. So I'd expect the forgetting class of bugs to mostly go away and the misread-the-spec class to sit ex…

LLMs trivially catch these things in review, and if you find agents agreeing incorrectly with each other (weak models?), maybe you need to be doing adversarial review.

It's pretty much solved, though I only use sota models.

I think for these convos, we need to see concrete fail cases so we can see what you're talking about and whether the truth matches up with the claim.

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

#519

Post by [deleted] »

bensyverson wrote: post #92

Much like security, optimization is now a function of token spend—which in some ways means it's a function of care. The reason why software may continue to be slower or less secure than it could be is simply that no one cares enough to invest the time and money in improving it. Off-topic, but Dan, in the name of all that is holy, throw a `max-width: 40em;` on your blog!

[deleted]

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

#520

Post by paganel »

embedding-shape wrote: post #437
paganel wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when LLMs will become either too expensive or unavailable?

I guess lots of Rust developers will find a lot of employment? I mean what happens with network engineers when the biggest network of them all goes down?

This AI thing is not at all similar to networking. It is up to a point, but in fact it isn’t.
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