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hunterpaynetoday at 5:41 AM4 repliesview on HN

"LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly."

This person doesn't understand how to make efficient code. I can write code in almost any language (with a couple of exceptions) that outperforms "super-optimized assembly". Writing efficient code isn't about the language, and often isn't about the best algorithms either (but sometimes it is). Its about optimizing memory and cache use. And that's orthogonal to anything the author is writing about. Also, LLMs are terrible at optimizing memory utilization. There is just too little training code that does it well and far too much that doesn't.

As proof, I'm can literally feel the web getting slower and I bet many others feel this as well.


Replies

malispertoday at 5:58 AM

> This person doesn't understand how to make efficient code

The author is one of the most knowledgeable people about performance there is

show 2 replies
whatisthiseventoday at 6:15 AM

My contradictory proof: I have been working on an old service with tons of performance issues, from server memory bloat, client graph rendering, excessive network requests, excessive repeat rendering, memory leaks, resource leaks, etc.

The app and service are measurably and subjectively faster. Because I chose to have the LLM focus on solving those problems. It obviously can. It described the issues in big-O.

It is a priority problem, as it always has been, not a knowledge or skill problem, like it always has been.

ddejohntoday at 6:22 AM

The author was paraphrasing a tweet written by somebody else:

> The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying [...]

userbinatortoday at 6:18 AM

Also, LLMs are terrible at optimizing memory utilization.

I've already posted this elsewhere, but here it is again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923

A vibe-coded OS that runs on an 8088 with 256KB of RAM.

As proof, I'm can literally feel the web getting slower and I bet many others feel this as well.

"It's not the tool, it's how you use it..."