Dev walk-back: the speedup came from SoA design and writev, not AGI-written asm
zack_overflow · x · 2026-09-26
Developer @zackoverflow revisits his viral "AGI beats the compiler" experiment: he had shown AI reading compiler-generated asm and instantly mapping it back to source — 1000x faster than a human — while spotting compiler blunders like register spilling.
Follow-up analysis found the gains didn't come from handwritten asm at all, but from better design: DOD (SoA layout), re-painting only what changed, and writev to reduce syscalls — all achievable in plain Rust. He jokes it was a "clanker psyop."
Related event: dhh Ports Rust to Assembly with Opus 5.5 for 17x Speedup(3 posts)→
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