Replies (1)

• @psf@oldbytes.space 2026-05-05 21:36

  @arclight@oldbytes.space The speed difference is less from LLMs than from dependency philosophy. In LLM land I was in "slam dependencies together until they kinda work" mode. LLMs are great at turning boilerplate generation/glue code/dependency wrangling into "type a few words then grab a sandwich". As a result of this crutch, large modern frameworks and languages become a lot more usable, almost fun? But this is enabling complexity, not removing it; there's still no hope of fitting the system in your head. Sometimes it seems that LLM use is like an outgrowth of library culture. If you are using libraries, you already don't understand those parts of your program that are handled by the libraries. LLMs extend that by allowing you to also not understand the part that you "wrote". This is the opposite of how I use Forth: in my current project I have no libraries and only a subset of ANS Forth. It's slower to build ground-up from a tiny set of primitives, than to use premade libraries, but it's also one of my art forms. When I don't do it for a while, I miss it.

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