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Re:The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs. result chasers by simonw on Friday March 13, 2026 @10:19AM (#47364825)
That codebase existed for 20 years and had contributions from nearly 200 people.

Sure, they could have come up with those optimizations without AI... but they didn't. What's your theory for why that is?

Re:The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs. result chasers by skydhash on Friday March 13, 2026 @12:09PM (#47366326)
Maybe because it’s a non issue. I saw that those improvements are in the order of micro seconds, while the transfer time of a page is measure in 1/10 seconds or even several seconds. Even a game engine have something like 15 ms to have a frame ready (60hz).
Re:The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs. result chasers by simonw on Friday March 13, 2026 @02:18PM (#47367746)
Lots of small improvements add up - the total performance improvement is 53%. That's significant.

If you're the size of Shopify that represents a huge saving in server costs and improved customer-facing latency.

Re:The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs. result chasers by skydhash on Friday March 13, 2026 @02:43PM (#47368041)
> the total performance improvement is 53%. That's significant.

This percentage is meaningless on its own. It’s 4 ms shaved off a 7 ms process. You would need to time a whole flow (and I believe databases would add a lot to it, especially with network latency) and figure out how significant the performance improvement is actually. And that without considering if the code changes is not conflicting with some architectural change that is being planned.

Re:The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs. result chasers by simonw on Friday March 13, 2026 @03:18PM (#47368480)
I'll take a 53% performance boost in my template language any day of the week.