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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

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

#171

Post by genxy »

jcelerier wrote: post #164
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…

I have a new laptop with a rtx 5090. Opening any GL context takes more than half a second. There's tons of things that can be optimized and are pretty far from web.

You should profile that, it is probably hitting the registry, the disk and maybe the network.

Try turning off wifi and see if it improves.

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

#172

Post by userbinator »

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.

What exactly do you mean by "make it approachable"? Is the content-to-fluff ratio too high for you? This page is exactly what I want the majority of websites to look like: no fluff, no idiotic "modern design" trendchasing bullshit, just pure and simple content.

Also, perhaps you should learn how to make use of the user stylesheet feature of your browser, or ask an AI to tell you how...

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

#173

Post by albert_e »

esikich wrote: post #165
Kuyawa wrote: post #146

Next time you ask your AI of choice to build an app, please tell them to use plain language without frameworks at all and keep modules to a minimum (ie. node express, ejs and pg, nothing else) and you will see a huuuuge difference

Yep, I feel like there's less of a reason to use frameworks now that you can just have it bash out only the needed stuff on its own. I've been able to make some really really tiny C tools and I'm absolutely loving it.

Good point.

Maybe if this philosophy / approach has a catchy name it might be more widely adopted and we all can have better more performant web and apps.

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

#175

Post by stickfigure »

za3faran wrote: post #158
eaftan wrote: post #148

I've been working on a similar agentically engineered regex project called SafeRE: https://github.com/eaftan/safere https://eaftan.github.io/safere-intro/ Mine is for Java and is intended to be production grade. The first goal is to guarantee linear-time behavior to prevent ReDoS attacks. My collaborator and I have recently been optimizing it to try to surpass native RE2 in performance. It turns out optimizations are…

This sounds very interesting. Which JVM profiler do you use?

Not OP, but I went through this last week. I (ok, codex) optimized a hot path in some Java code from ~350ms to ~60ms, which made a substantial difference in "is this whole business going to work".

My Java profiling knowledge is... let's call it "antique". I was really not looking forward to ramping back up for this work. Turns out, I didn't have to do any of it. The LLM chose the tools (flight recorder) and even built a JMH (also new to me) harness to experiment with different algorithms.

About half of the optimizations were things that I would have figured out on my own; the other half were definitely "wow" moments.

The whole thing was done in a couple hours, with just a few back-and-forths. Sans AI, it would have taken a week, with nowhere near the same gain. I'm impressed.

"Figure out how to make this process fast" is really a perfect activity for LLMs. And the prompt doesn't really have to be much more sophisticated than that.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

mccoyb wrote: post #73
Aurornis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The knobs you'd need to get serious performance are nearly unreachable in languages which LMs are good at (even Rust requires a discipline that the default language doesn't enforce). When you drop into the lower realms, you're trading consumption context for access to these levers. The levers are also "soft": you find yourself writing a bunch of skills, and tools to try and enforce the discipline. Hasn’t been my…

That's fair for a well-scoped subroutine: what I meant is that if you ask an agent to write a compiler and let it rip for a few days, you are going to be spending a few more days correcting the default behaviors in the distribution, which often do not tend towards hardware-oriented design. To correct those behaviors, you're going to write tools and skills, and that's going to help, but it is still clear that you are…

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by vinyl7 »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #160

Software will get slower as we do things beyond the current hardware capabilities which is always the case as hardware improves.

We have yet to reach the limit of the radius that we already have

https://www.dgtlgrove.com/p/near-the-zero-point

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

#178

Post by squirrellous »

This doesn’t seem to mention that having AI aggressively optimize software will result in code that is too clever / complex to be maintained by the original human author. For something with a very stable API and can be tested to death like a regex engine it’s likely workable. Other things, not so much. We have enough trouble maintaining AI generated code _without_ aggressive optimizations as is!

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

#180

Post by gulugawa »

I agree with the headline, but I don't think LLMs are a reliable way of optimizing software.

First of all, coding speed is not the main bottleneck. I've been working on my own JavaScript framework. Most of my work is talking to people about challenges they have with web development, doing research on existing tools, and thinking about features to add.

Coding more slowly without LLM usage is a benefit because it helps me understand every line of code. The slower pace also helps me think about making things intuitive and reflect on my experiences with React.

While my framework is outperforming React, that isn't particularly impressive. On the other hand, it demonstrates how ignoring LLMs improves quality. Also, my monthly token spend is $0.

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