Software has no excuse to be slow anymore — Dan Luu shows AI makes deep perf work cheap

There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

Dan Luu took FRE, a regex engine built by an agent loop over a month, and had AI wire AOT compilation into ripgrep in minutes — 2–4× faster on long queries, ~7% on real mixed queries. He also built the world’s strongest Azul AI with zero game-AI background using GPT-5.1/5.2-era models, winning mostly on cheap-to-him-now optimizations like multithreading and native compilation. Marc Brooker and Michael Malis agree: JIT compilers, custom indexes, and other formerly rare-skill work can now be done by anyone typing a few sentences. The post doesn’t give full holdout benchmark numbers for FRE or Elo/match counts for the Azul AI.

Why it matters: Dan Luu ran a concrete experiment: AI dropped AOT compilation into ripgrep in minutes, yielding 2-4x on long queries but only ~7% on real mixed workloads. Title is provocative but the data is honest. Good for perf-minded readers to debate AI tuning boundaries. Not p1 because i...