







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.
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?

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

Andrew Kelley: A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD)
Software Acceleration and Desynchronization
A look at the ever-present drive to make software delivery faster and how it might break down various activity loops in organizations.

Speed Comparison - Programming Languages
Benchmarks run on GitHub Actions. Results may vary based on runner hardware.

If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems | Debugging Leadership
AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy cultures, and an org chart that needs six meetings to decide what colour the button should be.

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