If you ask an LLM to code whatever, it definitely won’t produce optimized code.

If you direct it to do a specific task to find memory and cpu optimization points, based on perf metrics, then it’s a completely different world.

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jfim 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You can also tell it the optimization to implement.

I asked Claude to find all the valid words on a Boggle board given a dictionary and it wrote a simple implementation that basically tried to search for every single word on the board. Telling it to prune the dictionary first by building a bit mask of the letters in each word and on the board and then checking if the word is even possible to have on the board gave something like a 600x speedup with just a simple prompt of what to do.

That does assume that one has an idea of how to optimize though and what are the bottlenecks.

	▲	al_borland 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Can we assume at this point if the problems are well known, the low hanging fruit has already been addressed? The Boggle example seems like a pretty basic optimization that anyone writing a Boggle-solver would do. iOS is 19 years old, built on top of macOS, which is 24 years old, built on top of NeXTSTEP, which is 36 years old, built on top of BSD, which is 47 years old. We’re very far from greenfield.