LLMs Aren’t Smart Enough to Optimize Your Code. You’re Just Building a Better Trap.
We are asking the wrong question about AI and code performance. The debate over whether LLMs can reason about hardware misses the point. Optimization is no longer an intelligence test for the model; it’s an engineering test for your measurement harness. If you give an agent a benchmark, it will iterate faster than any human—but if you aren’t careful, it will mortgage your codebase’s maintainability for a microsecond.