The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly, but some variant of what Nolan Lawson said about testing, you can choose how many bugs you want now, which I less eloquently noted here, is becoming more true for performance.
There continue to be reasons for software to be slow
A discussion on the various reasons why performance is slow, and which ones are unlikely to be affected by LLMs. Originally written as a counter-point to Dan Luu
Slow Software
What it means for software to be fast, and why most software is not.
The Software We Haven’t Invented Yet, discussion and dinner hosted by Boxd and BlueYard · Luma
If this is such a big moment for software, why are we mostly imagining faster versions of what we already do? Better coding tools are the obvious part. The…
Malleable software in the age of LLMs
All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?
Malleable software in the age of LLMs
All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?
Malleable software in the age of LLMs
All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?
Wirth's law
Wirth's law is Niklaus Wirth's variant of the Jevons paradox: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.
Using AI to write better code more slowly
A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs, and merge them unvetted. Ship it! But t…
On genAI: Was prototyping really a bottleneck?
I keep hearing folks claim that the fact we can ‘prototype’ so quickly now is a good thing (thanks to modern genAI). But what if the slow parts about prototyping are actually what make it worth doing?
A Compiler Author’s Guide to WebAssembly GC by Oscar Spencer @ Wasm I/O 2025
Smarter Operating Systems Will Use Wasm - The Coming OS Revolution by Jonas Kruckenberg @ Wasm I/O
Wolfram LLM Benchmarking Project
Results from Wolfram's ongoing tracking of LLM performance. The benchmark is based on a Wolfram Language code generation task.
Slow down to speed up: so much has changed in 6 months’ time
An overview of what’s changed in engineering during the last six months, how various tech companies are changing how they work, and why slowing down could be a sensible strategy
PhilipK Devblog
In my experience, you can speed up your workflow in UI and Game development, by writing tests for the edge/hard-to-reproduce cases.
Andrew Kelley: A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD)
AI & Alignment Raw coding speed isn't the bottleneck. Alignment is the bottleneck. That seems to be a zeitgeist-y theme lately. If you're using AI to code, maybe you're feeling it. You can code more and faster. And clearly a boatload of other developers are doing that too. But software doesn't…
AI & Alignment
chriscoyier.net