A new wave of software efficiency is coming
The last two decades of (desktop) software engineering was mostly defined by bloated software like Electron, resource hogs like Chrome and outright slow and buggy UI. Not to mention slow programming languages like Python, Ruby and Perl.
To be clear: these developments were not unexpected or bad - they allowed us to create way more products and iterate quickly so it was a net positive. Electron abstracted out nitty gritty's of handling UI in specific OS contexts and no one wants to deal with that. We just want to ship products.
What we lost was the sense of speed and frugality in resource utilisation.
LLMs will accelerate optimisation
LLM's are particularly suited for the optimisation loop. This is because every software is defined by the upper layer of functionality which is more or less well defined. The inner layer can be optimised and LLM's can use the fact that verification is straightforward in these cases.
What I mean is this: Imagine this prompt
/goal Optimise the Electron codebase so that the resource utilisation is minimised by at least 40%.
With this, also reduce the latency and frame rate of the application.
Make sure to not break functionality and use the comprehensive /test skill to verify this.
The LLM can constantly iterate and optimise until the goal is reached.
I predict that we will see LLM's optimising software at many layers one by one - language layer, application layer, DB layer and even web apps.
By 2028 we would see at least a few non trivial performance optimisations of consumer software using LLM's especially in the optimise -> verify loop.