[bootsmann]

Comparing LLMs to programming languages is a fake equivalence. I don’t have to write assembly because LLVM will do that for me correctly in 100% of the cases, while AI might or might not (especially the more I move away from template crud apps)

[nharada]

it might be functionally correct but if you wrote it yourself it could be orders of magnitude faster

[jowea]

We've been on the Electron era long enough to know that developer time is more expensive than CPU time.

[Jensson]

That is a myth, cpu time is time spent waiting around by your users as the cpu is taking seconds to do something that could be instant, if you have millions of users and that happens every day that quickly adds up to many years worth of time.

It might be true if you just look at development cost, but if you look at value as a whole it isn't. And even just development cost its often not true, since time spent waiting around by the developer for tests to run and things to start also slows things down, taking a bit of time there to reduce cpu time is well worth it just to get things done faster.

[jowea]

Yeah, it's time spent by the users. Maybe it's an inneficiency of the market because the software company doesn't feel the negative effect enough, maybe it really is cheaper in aggregate that doing 3 different native apps in C++. But if CPU time is so valuable, why aren't we arguing for hand written C or even assembly code instead of the layers upon layers of abstraction in even native modern software?

Also, why

[whywhywhywhy]

> But if CPU time is so valuable, why aren't we arguing for hand written C or even assembly code instead of the layers upon layers of abstraction

Maybe we should, all it took was Figma taking it seriously and working at a lower level to make every other competitor feel awful and clunky next to it then it went on to dominate the market.

[sarchertech]

> But if CPU time is so valuable, why aren't we arguing for hand written C or even assembly code instead of the layers upon layers of abstraction in even native modern software?

Many of us do frequently argue for something similar. Take a look at Casey Muratori’s performance aware programming series if you care about the arguments.

[Jensson]

> But if CPU time is so valuable, why aren't we arguing for hand written C or even assembly code instead of the layers upon layers of abstraction in even native modern software?

That is an extreme case though, I didn't mean that all optimizations are always worth it, but if we look at marginal value gained from optimizations today the payback is usually massive.

It isn't done enough since managers tend to undervalue user and developer time. But users don't undervalue user time, if your program wastes their time many users will stop using it, users are pretty rational about that aspect and prefer faster products or sites unless they are very lacking. If a website is slow a few times in a row I start looking for alternatives, and data says most users do that.

I even stopped my JetBrains subscription since the editor got so much slower in an update, so I just use the one I can keep forever as I don't want their patched editor. If it didn't get slower I'd gladly keep it as I liked some of the new features, but it being slower was enough to make me go back.

Also, while managers can obvious agree that making developer spend less time waiting is a good thing, it is very rare for managers to tell you to optimize compilation times or such, and pretty simple optimizations there can often make that part of the work massively faster. Like, if you profile your C++ compiler and look what files it spends time compiling, then look at those files to figure out why its so slow there, you can find these weird things and fixing those speeds it up 10x, so what took 30 seconds now takes 3 seconds, that is obviously very helpful and if you are used to that sort of thing you could do it in a couple of hours.

[freehorse]

No, I wouldn't. That would require me be proficient in this, and I am not, so I am pretty sure I would not get to write better assembly optimisations unless I actually became better in that.

The difference is that there is no point (I know or would encounter) in which a compiler would not actually be able to do the job, and I would need to write manual assembly to fix some parts that the compiler could not compile. Yes a proficient programmer could probably do that to optimise the code, but the code would run and do the job regardless. That is not the case for LLMs, there is a non-zero changeyou get to the point of LLM agents getting stuck and it makes more sense to get hands dirty than iterating with agents.