Antirez definitely knows how to write efficient code given that he's the dude who made Redis and many other things, so I'm skeptical that you could "easily" get 100x performance, though it does seem like he used Claude to assist with this so there probably is some low hanging fruit fixes.

I'm working on building a JIT for an emulator and there is no end in sight. Running plenty of experiments though. So I guess that is something. LLMs are not good at building emulators unless they have a reference implementation in the training data.