julesrms

Strings are trivial in C++. Drawing 2D graphics is fine, many libraries do it. Creating old-fashioned component frameworks (like Qt, JUCE, etc) is easy. I implemented all those things on my own, decades before AI.

The hard bit is when you have complex, responsive layouts involving text. (And styling it)

Something seemingly trivial like an agent-style chat containing markdown text blocks, where it's expandable and smoothly scrollable is insanely difficult. The only frameworks that do this well are browsers, and the amount of horrible, horrible logic hidden inside them to make it look easy is hard to believe.

And since in many agents you're also going to want to display actual HTML, unless you're going to embed a browser engine in your C++ library, that's just not doable.

The big hoo-har about it earlier this year was because something (opencode?) was pretending to be the claude CLI and using the API that way. Anthropic made a fuss, then GPT said "we don't mind people using their own harnesses" and everyone relaxed about it, as long as the harness goes via the claude CLI and doesn't try to cheat.

I fully understand the merits of AOT vs JIT, I've worked on compiler tech, built JIT engines, and done lots of high performance realtime stuff for decades.

But if:

- we're talking about compiled code, where the compiler has already squeezed out all the low hanging fruit in terms of performance

- it's running some kind of external process somehow watching the data flow around in memory, and is figuring out what code is doing what. This is at best incredibly expensive, even if happening in parallel

..then the chances of actually finding useful micro-optimisations that are also safe to patch while running without changing the memory layout and messing up.. is surely pretty close to zero.

I can only assume that it's not actually native code, and they've built some kind of python JIT engine which is finding efficient replacements for chunks of common python, where it starts off so slow that even the massive amount of effort required manages to pay off in a long enough run.

If you don't have part of the source code, then presumably that's because it was compiled, and there is almost no margin left for optimisation over what a modern compiler will already have done. I've written a JIT where we squeeze out a bit of gain over static compilation by vectorising to the available SIMD size, but it's marginal in most situations.

You say "think libc" - are you suggesting they could dynamically recompile bits of libc and do better than LLVM's link time optimiser already did it??

What I assumed was that you'd run this thing on some test runs, as a profiler step, and create an optimised binary. But you say they expect to run your code through an LLM all the time!?

The idea that you could run your code through an LLM (which must surely slow it down 100x at least), and then find enough missed optimisation opportunities to make up for that slowdown is nuts! (Or I've just misunderstood the whole premise!)

Honestly, the places in programs where you can get meaningful performance gain (that isn't already handled by your compiler) is all at the high-level big-O level, and that doesn't require runtime inspection.

Sorry to be cynical, a lot of smart people seem to have built this.. but I'm failing to see how it's any better than "hey claude, here's my program and a profiling tool, go do your stuff"

Compared to Trump, my cat has super intelligence.

Bullies love to force people weaker than themselves do pointless acts like this, just to reassure themselves that they have power over them. I imagine that once enough companies have capitulated to this nonsense, he'll then decide it should become "American Intelligence"

Absolutely.. If I had a project with 30k commits per day (or even per month!) I'd be keeping that secret, not blogging about it!

30k commits per day on a console app?? Are these all one-line changes?

I've written a harness myself and fair enough, it's more complicated than you might expect.. but surely at this point the claude CLI is pretty stable, and this must mainly be a ridiculous amount of test churn.

Or maybe their team of clankers is just creating busy-work to make the humans think they're essential. That's not unheard of in the human behaviours that they're trained on.