It's a matter of trade-offs.

In theory, Handy could be developed by hand-rolling assembly. Maybe even binary machine code.

- It would probably be much faster, smaller and use less memory. But...

- It would probably not be cross-platform (Handy works on Linux, MacOS, and Windows)

- It would probably take years or decades to develop (Handy was developed by a single dev in single digit months for the initial version)

- It would probably be more difficult to maintain. Instead of re-using general purpose libraries and frameworks, it would all be custom code with the single purpose of supporting Handy.

- Also, Handy uses an LLM for transcription. LLM's are known to require a lot of RAM to perform well. So most of the RAM is probably being used by the transcription model. An LLM is basically a large auto-complete, so you need a lot of RAM to store all the mappings to inputs and outputs. So the hand-rolled assembly version could still use a lot of RAM...