Re "is fast as can be": in my experience generating C/Zig code via Codex, agent generated code is usually several multiples slower than hand optimized code.
Re "is fast as can be": in my experience generating C/Zig code via Codex, agent generated code is usually several multiples slower than hand optimized code.
Look, it's an RSS reader, not a numeric solver for PDEs. What I clearly meant was: Every interaction is instant, no noticable delay at all, except the reader view, which makes a network request to an external site.
Yeah, I’m sure my Claude generated email client could be even faster if I wrote it by hand. Modern computers can retire billions of instructions per second per core. All operations that aren’t downloading or processing gigabytes of data should be instant on modern computers.
Claude’s toy email client gets closer to the speed limit than Gmail does. Why is Gmail so slow? I have no idea.
Given parent and GP are both using Claude... have you tried Claude? (I say this as someone who has not tried Claude recently. I did try Claude Code when it first came out, though.)
First, it is important for these discussions that people include details like I did. We're all better off to not generalize.
RE: Claude Code, no I haven't used it, but I did do the Anthropic interview problem, beating all of Anthropic's reported Claude scores even with custom harnesses etc.
It's not a dunk that agents can't produce "as fast as can be" code; their code is usually still reasonably fast; it's just often 2-10x slower than can be.
There is a lot to be done with good prompting.
Early on, these code agents wouldn't do basic good hygiene things, like check if the code compiled, avoid hallucinating weird modules, writing unit tests. And people would say they sucked ....
But if you just asked them to do those things: "After you write a file lint it and fix issues. After you finish this feature, write unit tests and fix all issues, etc ..."
Well, then they did that, it was great! Later the default prompts of these systems included enough verbiage to do that, you could get lazy again. Plus the models are are being optimized to know to do some of these things, and also avoid some bad code patterns from the start.
But the same applies to performance today. If you ask it to optimize for performance, to use a profiler, to analyze the algorithms and systemically try various optimization approaches ... it will do so, often to very good results.