Slow Software

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 for a Burning World 🔥

In a world of “move fast and break things,” we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship. Slow software means building for long-term resilience and meaningful participation, rather than chasing novelty, speed, or scale.

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.

There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

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.

Why We Can't Have Nice Software - Andrew Kelley

The problem with software is that it's too powerful. It creates so much wealth so fast that it's virtually impossible to not distribute it.

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.

AI Makes Better Software

Don't use AI to ship software faster. Use it to ship better software.

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

Code Is Cheap Now. Software Isn’t.

The barrier to entry for building software has collapsed. The barrier to building something that matters hasn’t moved an inch.

Chroma is now 4x faster

Two years ago, we set out to make AI retrieval effortless for developers. 30+ million downloads later, that vision is becoming reality with widespread adoption across hackathon projects, fast-growing AI startups, and Fortune 500 companies.

Ruby has been fast enough for 13 years

When I started programming Ruby, it was on an Apple iBook G4/800. That beautiful 12” powerhouse of a 800 MHz PowerPC with a rocking 256MB of RAM. A lovely computer that was not only fast enough to …

It’s actually open source software that's eating the world

At Lightspeed we’ve been investing aggressively in open source software (OSS) businesses for the past 10 years. Recently, we’ve seen a significant increase in entrepreneurs pitching open source startups, and we’ve also seen greater competition for these deals. We pulled together some numbers in an attempt to measure the acceleration in interest in and funding for OSS businesses in the last few years. The results were staggering even to us.

Perfect Software - Software for an Audience of One

We have many names to describe personal tools. Malleable software speaks to how it behaves. Home-cooked software speaks to who makes it.

The $70B Open Source Software Paradox

It’s no news that over the last 10-15 years, particularly noticeable in the last 5 years, the enterprise software industry has gradually transformed from complex, expensive, closed-source (proprietary) software stacks to extensible/configurable,...