Software Can Be Fast Now

Bitwarden is slow now that they migrated to Angular or React or something else - but you needn't go along with that

My favourite thing about modern LLM-assisted development is how fast you can make software. In the past, you were pretty much stuck making a bug report and then upstream would figure out how you fit into their plans and where speed is prioritized against features and this and that. This is all dead today.

With upstream as one's reference, one can brutally prune the feature tree until only that which one wants remains in the software. Usage-guided optimization can now allow for software to be chopped down until it is much smaller and reflects precisely the feature set that a user wants. Most users do not actually care about speed, so this helps minority-opinion users like me. It is a Tree shaking of a different sort - at the feature level.

Now, upstream has all sorts of concerns in this situation: they have an engineering team that must be able to comprehend everything; they must run in a cross-platform way; they have a larger option set than I need. These are real constraints. Engineering isn't about building bridges that stay up as much as it is about building bridges that barely stay up. It's just that they're solving for a different problem than each individual.

In the future, this entire effort might be automated. One could even imagine a sort of dream/reflection loop on one's computer where one's usage of the day is analysed and software is improved to target those use-cases. We can't make software that constantly changes how it looks, but actually removing things that aren't used might well work.

The fact that it is commonly possible to do this kind of tree shaking actually causes a frustration for me when I hit software that I cannot edit - and this is principally MacOS because it is proprietary, heavily-signed, slow, and mostly not-editable. I immediately understand why Omarchy has won so much popularity recently since it embraces the editability of Linux distributions to a great degree and is almost entirely vibe-coded.

Perhaps one day I should sit down and try to port the stuff I care for from MacOS to Linux, and then I can use Omarchy.