--- title: Wirth's Revenge | daily.dev description: Wirth's Law states that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. While many historical tradeoffs between performance and accessibility were... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/wirth-s-revenge-selxucgnm twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Wirth's Revenge | daily.dev og:description: Wirth's Law states that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. While many historical tradeoffs between performance and accessibility were... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/wirth-s-revenge-selxucgnm og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/SELxucgnM.png og:image:alt: Wirth's Revenge og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Wirth's Revenge **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 14 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Wirth's Law states that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. While many historical tradeoffs between performance and accessibility were worthwhile, LLMs may represent a problematic shift. Unlike traditional programming where engineers optimize for efficiency, LLMs encourage users to solve problems by repeatedly querying expensive models rather than building deterministic solutions. This pattern leads to astronomical computational costs for simple tasks and may erode fundamental programming skills. Research shows AI use impairs conceptual understanding without delivering efficiency gains. The concern is that LLMs create a thought-terminating approach to problem-solving, potentially crossing into a "bad" Wirth tradeoff where runtime complexity grows faster than hardware can compensate. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The next hit: How LLMs change the way engineers work](https://daily.dev/posts/the-next-hit-how-llms-change-the-way-engineers-work-y3ba4zyqx) · RUBYLAND · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Future of Software Development is Software Developers](https://daily.dev/posts/the-future-of-software-development-is-software-developers-clpbexose) · Hacker News · 8 upvotes · 2 comments - [Software Development in 2026](https://daily.dev/posts/software-development-in-2026-q2wl4qawy) · Beam Bloggers Webring · 4 upvotes · 0 comments - [There continue to be reasons for software to be slow](https://daily.dev/posts/there-continue-to-be-reasons-for-software-to-be-slow-1euu022cd) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#cloud](https://daily.dev/tags/cloud), [#performance](https://daily.dev/tags/performance), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/wirth-s-revenge-selxucgnm) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Wirth's Revenge","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/wirth-s-revenge-selxucgnm","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/wirth-s-revenge-selxucgnm"},"datePublished":"2026-02-05T12:48:07.864Z","dateModified":"2026-02-05T12:48:29.640Z","description":"Wirth's Law states that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. 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