So long as the way to improve software is "just stack another VM on it", software will continue to get slower.

Cutting edge development practice in 2025 was using a big JavaScript framework (not quite VMs, but they inherently strain the environments they run in).

That code is run by the JavaScript interpreter VM, which is running in the browser (another VM), which was (in whole or part) written in a managed language (another VM).

That program runs on top of the OS (another VM), which runs on another VM (the default hypervisor for Windows 10/11, or the desktop environment for Linux/macOS).

Each VM lets you have an entirely new managed programming environment- you have a new program that lets you write software even quicker than before- but that comes at the expense of memory usage and (most importantly) latency. Which is why it takes modern systems a few seconds to figure out you pressed a button in your React application that's running in an isolated browser instance consuming 1GB of RAM, where systems in the 90s were instant by comparison even though they had a fraction of the processing power.

It's conceivable that in 10-20 years, LLMs could be used as VMs in and of themselves, which will still likely be using 2020s development languages. So your software is going to require at least 128GB of RAM to compile, use another 32GB to run, and it'll take twice as long to respond to clicking a button.

It will be the equivalent of that Excel =COPILOT(“sum the numbers above”) meme.

I’m a lot more optimistic now that RAM is scarce. A lot of focus will be on maximizing software performance.

See: iOS 27. It’s faster than the previous version, even on very old phones.

I also think AI will contribute to removing a lot of the tedium surrounding optimization.

I agree, but it won’t be because we can’t do it. It will be easier than ever to achieve, but of course money for the tokens to do it will go toward some other aspect of the business. That the products get worse seems to be the rule.

For the same reasons, too. Software is buggy and slow because you impact the bottom line when you make it better. Same thing with LLMs and token expenses.

you are probably right as far as desktop stuff is concerned.

But there were some sea changes from time to time.

When the iphone came out, phones became very responsive to fingers. hate the control apple gave to customers, but their guidance made apps respond in milliseconds. Before that phones were clumsy. Wasn't a desktop, but was different.

Will we have voice/chat interfaces that will be bloated... but responsive like a conversation?

For Desktop use, 100% of electron and python slowness will be gone in a couple of years, at least for new projects. If you're using Rust (or Mojo or C/C++), you'll have to try hard (almost a deliberate effort) to make software slow.