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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

danluu.com

21–30 of 530 posts

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

#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.

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

#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 from doing fewer loads and taking up fewer itlb slots and stuff like that.

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

#23

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.

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

#25

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.

People these days are saying “don’t look at the code”.

People are shipping all sorts of weird architectures, non-performance code, etc.

I wish that the ram scarcity would drive more performant software however I just think that the way people are shipping software currently will not lead to this

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

#26
Giving an LLM a program that does a well defined thing correctly and asking it to make a faster version and a crapload of tests to show that it performs exactly the same task is a great way to burn through a bunch of tokens and getting a faster program in return.

I currently have one running working on a multi path problem trying to make an A* heuristic that produces the same or better score for search time, paths crossed, corners taken (plus a few other metrics, like proximity of opposite direction corners of unconnected paths.)

I have another where I'm testing how well it can iteratively rewrite the same program without regressions and successively stricter resource conditions. Instead of progressively adding lines of code to make an over engineered behemoth, starting over with the previous version as a template of functionality lets it consider the problem increasingly holistically

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

#27

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.

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.

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

#29

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.

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

#30

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.

Is iOS 27 particularly impressive, or was iOS 26 a shitheap? Maybe a bit of both.
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