dhh ports Omarchy screensaver from Rust to assembly with Opus, hits 450x speedup

AccBalanced · x · 2026-09-27

dhh (Ruby on Rails creator) shared that he used Opus 5.5 to one-shot translate the Omarchy screensaver engine (ttfx) from Rust to x86-64 assembly, achieving a 17x speedup on the first pass. Further iterations pushed it to 22x faster at peak, 6x on mean, and up to 450x faster than the original Python implementation, with SSE2, AVX2 and AVX-512 support and fallback to the slower Rust path otherwise.

"We keep drilling until the agentic drill bit hits bedrock," he wrote — a striking demonstration of agentic coding on systems-level performance work.

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