HN Explorer

Era of Bloated Software Is Over

5 points by pushkar_aditya ↗ HN
The bloated internet with laggy, slow websites is coming to an end. Over time, it’ll drastically decrease, and once again, average sites will load fast, render smoothly, and have fewer unnecessary animations.

You might ask why ?

Let me give you a simple example:

Say a developer is creating a button that increases in width by 3% on hover, with smooth transition. Right now, most designers/UI devs would just slap on framer-motion without thinking, which increases the load and build time of that component. But it could be done using just default Tailwind classes.

Now in the case of AI platforms if they have the option to use motion vs raw Tailwind classes, they will (or should) take the Tailwind route. Why? Because these AI companies rent a lot of GPU to render the UI, and using framer-motion will costs more than just using plain Tailwind bcs more build time equal to more money spent on gpu.

And the positive side effect of this?

We’ll start seeing more optimized code. And since a lot of devs are lazy (let’s be real), they’ll directly paste whatever they get from the platform. So that’s a good side effect.

10 comments

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TheSamFischer
> Because these AI companies rent a lot of GPU to render the UI

What AI company is rendering websites for me on their GPUs?

> We’ll start seeing more optimized code.

No. We'll see more AI-generated code. AI-generated code is derived from human generated code. Most human generated code is slow (see: your own title).

pushkar_aditya
So,apps like Lovable, V0 and similar tools use GPUs to render your UIs after generation. As for the second part, you said “no” most of these challenges can be easily tackled with prompting, fine tuning, code context, and a little human intervention. And the fact that in just five years of mainstream AI we have already reached the point where we can use LLM code generation for production apps is incredible. Just imagine what we will achieve in the next 5 to 10 years
mikewarot
LLM generated code is legacy code and we're having it generated at increasingly fast rates. The bloat in software is undergoing a step change increase, not decrease.
pushkar_aditya
In just five years, we have advanced LLMs to the point where they can already generate production level code. Yes, sometimes the output contains bloat, but isn’t it our responsibility to ensure it doesn’t? We can easily address that with good prompting, fine tuning and code context with little human intervention. Considering how far we have come in just five years, imagine what these models will be capable of in the future. Im confident that in another five years, LLMs will be so advanced that theywill generate less and less bloated code over time and adapt itself according to our need.
soulchild37
Lmao, wake me up when Notion become actually usable
Someone
> And since a lot of devs are lazy (let’s be real), they’ll directly paste whatever they get from the platform.

If so, there will be a zillion slightly different ways to do foo in the code base. I don’t see how that would decrease bloat.

Asking the LLM to reduce code duplication might help a bit, but (call me a pessimist) I think it will introduce subtle bugs, too.

pushkar_aditya
In context of UI code generation, there are only so many ways a UI can be built. For example, everyone knows that unnecessary re renders are bad, and that in React it’s best to minimize the use of useEffect and useState whenever possible. Even today, LLMs can already generate fairly optimized UI code. And if you want an even more optimized version, you can simply add instructions in the prompt, asking it to avoid useEffect, useCallback, or useMemo and so on.... unless absolutely necessary. But of course, this kind of implementation usually comes from someone with development experience.

Now, think about a new developer who has just started coding. Let’s say they build a side project called Top Million Developers, where the app fetches data from an API and renders a Table with simple pagination on client side. They launch it on Twitter, it goes viral, and suddenly they are getting thousands of page views. Very quickly, they wll notice their site is slow or even unusable because they didn’t know that rendering a large table in React is not that straightforward. They should have used virtualization to handle it efficiently.

In today’s world, though, the same developer doesn’t need to figure this out manually. Instead, they could simply ask an LLM to generate the code, and it would most likely return an optimized version with proper virtualization and pagination built in.

That is what I mean when I say LLMs can already output optimized code not perfect but quite a optimized code by default in context if UI.

gkoos
Web bloat is coming from every angle, including - surprise - LLM's. So no, I don't think it's over. Also wdym AI companies rendering UI? You mean the chatgpt textbox?
pushkar_aditya
No like UI generator platform Like lovable, Bolt and V0 they all use GPU in background in order to render thi UI