There Is Plenty of Room at the Top : How AI Could Change Software Performance

This week I found myself watching the Rails World keynote whereby DHH said their email platform's backend is now written in Rust thanks majorly to AI. Moreover, the amount of resources that this new backend consumes is so little that they can possibly run their whole traffic on the humble raspberry pi.

For quit some time now developers have made the trade off of creating
programs quickly by using higher level languages that sacrificed performance for productivity and being joyfully oblivious about microprocessor architecture. Personally I like using Python but I know I am losing some performance for the joy of writing programs using this it.

The issue is as programmers we had been assured that the programs we
write would run faster since microprocessors used to get faster each year.We needed not do anything to our code, we just had wait for the microprocessor architects to do their magic. However for some time now, microprocessors have not been getting steadily faster due to physical and power constraints.But we have been getting more cores per CPU.

High level languages have abstracted so much that we do not know much about the processors that our code runs on and thus do not even know what facilities in the processor we can take advantage of in order to run our algorithms more efficiently.

Writing performant code requires one to dedicate a substantial amount of time to learn about algorithms, data structures and computer architecture.As programmers because of the relative speeds of our current systems we have not cared much to look into these subjects as most of us do not write programs that are affected that much by doing things inefficiently.

AI will get this burden from heads and I foresee a future whereby all programs prompted into life use processors as efficiently as the can. Most probably they will all be written in compiled languages as they are the ones that have facilities to make use of the different parts of the processor and have no overhead.

So although I am sad that hand writing code will mostly go the way of the dodo atleast I am rest assured that the our machines will be used effectively.