Dan Luu Argues Coding Agents Killed the Economics of Not Optimizing, With ripgrep and a Regex Engine as Worked Examples
Dan Luu / Hacker News·high signal
Dan Luu's post hit 465 points and 332 comments, arguing the cost of performance work has collapsed now that Claude and Codex agents can run the optimization passes that used to need a specialist. He shows a 7% speedup on a regex engine via native AOT compilation, roughly 100 Elo per doubling of speed in an Azul game AI, and 2% over stock ripgrep on a holdout after one agent-driven pass. His workload data is worth stealing on its own: median ripgrep pattern length 55 Unicode code points, p90 119, p99 queries near a minute and the worst approaching two hours.