Writing Rust code that's fast by asking agents to make the code faster
That was prior to the advent of robust agentic coding, but Claude Sonnet 3.5 was still able to iteratively improve on algorithmic Python code. The “better” instruction turned out to be underspecified: Sonnet abused that ambiguity to instead add a ton of useless features but the code was indeed faster. You’ve been warned.Iterative “Benchmaxxing”#At first, making software faster was a good quantitative way for me to test and compare these new agentic models.
- ▪That was prior to the advent of robust agentic coding, but Claude Sonnet 3.5 was still able to iteratively improve on algorithmic Python code.
- ▪The “better” instruction turned out to be underspecified: Sonnet abused that ambiguity to instead add a ton of useless features but the code was indeed faster.
- ▪You’ve been warned.Iterative “Benchmaxxing”#At first, making software faster was a good quantitative way for me to test and compare these new agentic models.
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Writing Rust code that's faster than state-of-the-art libraries by asking agents to make the code fasterSeptember 21, 2026 · 26 minpre code.language-txt,pre code.language-md{white-space:pre-wrap!important;word-break:normal!important}In January 2025, I had a fun hypothesis for a blog post: can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”? That was prior to the advent of robust agentic coding, but Claude Sonnet 3.5 was still able to iteratively improve on algorithmic Python code. The “better” instruction turned out to be underspecified: Sonnet abused that ambiguity to instead add a ton of useless features but the code was indeed faster.
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