I don't think we will in the HN snark sense of "this react site or electron app uses way too much memory". Those companies will continue to work in the same way, maybe even less efficiently as people chase modern UIs with extra animations or videos or effects, or with some AI code generation tacking on too many features or tech debt.
In specific sectors I do think we will see more optimization. If you're working on cloud compute or AI training / large scale data processing, there will be a big focus on optimization as prices are very large at that scale and shortages have a bigger effect.
Also in gaming I think the next cycle will be different. Big game studios used to push for the best possible graphics that might require the newest consoles or high end gaming computers, but the next releases might not be as much of an upgrade. The next gen of consoles or graphics cards themselves might be delayed, or be less powerful, or be too expensive and flop, as chip manufacturing companies continue focus on more lucrative markets and leave average consumers behind.
Some programmers will write more efficient code. At my $dayjob (one of the big tech companies) we're already planning a major goal next year of optimizing server code to reduce RAM requirements, and this is directly in response to the crunch.
In practice I expect most optimizations will come from "stop doing stupid stuff" and not "use fancy advanced algorithms." But that's a cynical perspective so don't be cynical like me.
Real, there are so many low hanging fruits for optimization but no one has time to do them. And they don’t incentivize spending your time on it either.
If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.
If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device.
There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier.
Why games? Because there is a clear point where people stop buying games. Minimum hw specs are known before buying.
> If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.
Recently I booted up Insurgency: Sandstorm. With a 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 at 1080p and high graphics, the game runs at around 200 FPS. Meanwhile, pretty much any modern UE5 title (with the exception of Ready or Not and Split Fiction, from what I've seen) runs horribly - the interesting thing is that no matter how much you tweak the .ini files or change the graphics settings you can't get something like STALKER 2 or The Forever Winter or Borderlands 4 to run as well as UE4 with the graphics similar to those old games. Instead you get something that runs at like 10% of the render resolution and still doesn't get 60 FPS (I'm not exaggerating, literally the performance I got in The Forever Winter).
There's no good technical reason for things to be that way (Unity still exists, and the games made in it struggle less) other than the devs or the higher ups choosing higher fidelity but more expensive rendering technologies and using upscaling and framegen not as something that helps laptops or when you need the spare GPU capacity (e.g. encoding a video recording of the game), but rather as something that's supposed to be used to even get to 60 FPS in the first place.
I don't know what needs to change for things to get better.
I also don't see anyone particularly caring about regular software, Electron et al are just too convenient to develop in (having to create per-platform UIs sucks in already-overworked teams).
If you listen to gaming Youtube then the gaming industry is already in trouble from hardware costs and availability. I'm not sure if they are making a mountain out of a mole hill or not though.
> There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier.
Spot on.
Now with LLMs and desktop app libraries such as Tauri, there is little excuse in choosing Electron to build memory hungry apps other than laziness.
Are programmers and their use of data structures driving up storage requirements in games though? Or is it just high poly models and high res textures?
I guess it's not just models and textures. Those should be the easiest to dial down, even optionally with a "low" setting. Maybe making high-res assets an optional download, to reduce game size (ssds are also getting expensive)
Until prices hit the large hyperscalers, I don't think most people are going to make significant changes. You might see a small set of open source projects related to self hosting put in an effort, but in general, I don't think so.
Some big-tech orgs (that have their own hardware) will take costs into account, but they already do that. The "optimization" is more likely to be business-optimizations; "this can be slower if it uses less memory", rather than inventing new stuff.
Note that I am excluding any of the big AI labs. They are definitely going to be working to figure out how to use less memory, but that's primarily not related to the direct cost.
Programmers might write more efficient code if the performance was unacceptable on their own laptops, but even in the not-flush-with-cash companies I've worked all my career, it's been easy for me to always have a dev laptop with twice as much RAM as most consumers have. I'm presently working on a laptop with 64GB, and we don't even use any local AI models. If a PE company is willing to spec dev laptops like this, even in the memory shortage, then I assume the memory pressure will never hit developers.
So, this carefree attitude directly shapes all code that runs client-side (JS + native apps) since the only impact on the company is whatever happens on the dev's laptop. The rest of the impact is "free" since it's paid (in either money or in misery) by customers.
For server side, I also highly doubt it, as being more memory efficient on the server side has always had a benefit to the company who pays the bill. The only things that may change may be the relative cost, but if management comes and says "AWS bill going up, help?" devs will say "OK, we can find ways to save RAM, but the team won't be doing any new features or fixing any customer-facing bugs during that time" and management will say "Okie dokie, we'll just pay the bigger bill then."
For this incentive to exist, the app needs to be such an obvious memory hog that users start identifying it as the source of the problem.
Even then, a lot is required for most businesses to prioritize this (presumably) temporary issue at the cost of things like: participation in the AI race, other features, bug fixes, new markets etc.
Heck, sometimes software is so inefficient that it costs developer and tester productivity but a fix is not prioritized for years.
Your response suggests that you're only considering native apps where users can view memory usage.
For cloud apps where the costs are largely hidden from users, the user has no way of doing that analysis. I agree with the second part of what you said, though: I expect businesses to just raise their prices in those cases rather than systematically focus on actual difficult engineering problems.
One can certainly wish, but I am inclined to believe that RAM use isn’t just about sloppy programmers. I think it is, to a significant degree, about the kinds of problems we solve now that we have more RAM.
And not all exorbitant RAM use is about sloppiness. Sometimes you can trade more RAM use for lower complexity. Bugs and development time were expensive. RAM was not. So sometimes there is calculation rather than sloppiness behind certain types of heavy RAM use.
> bundling Chromium to make a chat app is the problem.
Precisely. And all that extra resource wastage is completely free! (paid by your customers).
Perhaps if there were any big software companies who were so iconoclastic as to write fast software and avoid wasteful patterns like using Electron, pressure to do better could be felt, but every company that ships software[1] behaves the same so if anyone tries out competition due to performance beefs, they'll have no relief. They'll be forced to blame their hardware and upgrade it.
[1] Only exception of course is some indie developers. I don't know of any companies that have more than about 2 devs who haven't adopted the 'modern' approach, where we only fix performance issues that completely block using the app.
I've dumped python for anything that doesn't involve scipy / pytorch in favor of go. So yes, I'm having my llm's output go now which is generally more memory efficient than python.
Python isn't even that bad, I have python desktop apps that use 50mb of memory. More than needed but not 1-2gb realm people complain about with electron stuff.
The memory shortage is really for these insane memory requirements for LLMs.
A web browser and the basic mobile app will be fine.
The iPhone 17 Pro has the most RAM and it's only 12GB. Hell the iPhone 16 Pro only had 8 GB. The vast majority of consumer cases don't need it. I doubt Apple and other manufacturers will go beyond that to keep prices down.
I doubt many of the newer generation ever even tried. Maybe they had a course at uni where they did some C or Assembly, but that's probably the extend of it. So no, I don't think so lol.
But I’m hopefully optimistic that we’ll see a renewed emphasis on speed and responsiveness, since users do notice that despite most products ignoring it.
If the producers see a long term demand for memory they will meet the challenge and produce enough to bring prices down.
Economics will invariably alleviate the memory crunch. It just takes long and requires a huge upfront CapEx.
They have been burned in the past and are hesitant to over invest, worried that the bubble might burst.
I expect high prices to stick around for a while, but I would be surprised if this was permanent.
Which means to me, that price pressure probably won't be the driving force for writing more memory efficient software.
For those who want, I expect AI to make it easier to do that, assuming it's done right, i.e. not vibe coding it.
If you have a subscription to The Economist, I recommend listening to this Money Talks podcast. They talk about the shortage and the economics behind it.
Of course not. Why would they? The software nowadays is mostly written for people who already own computers with RAM already installed. Yeah, they probably won't upgrade for the next couple of years, so what?
Besides, have you heard about "virtual memory" and "swapping"? Nowadays, SSDs (and especially NVMe) are quite fast, so thrashing is much less of an issue.
I don't see the underlying economic dynamics of the relevance of substitution costs driving the way we do things going away. And substitution costs are all about limitations.
Abundance and limitations are a bit of ying/yang phenomena in terms of driving things, you don't have one without the other.
Igor Stravinsky: "Constraint drives creativity"
(I also don't see Amdahl's Law --which is fundamentally about limitations -- going away any time soon.)
I do agree that there are compounding abundancies present.
I don't think we will in the HN snark sense of "this react site or electron app uses way too much memory". Those companies will continue to work in the same way, maybe even less efficiently as people chase modern UIs with extra animations or videos or effects, or with some AI code generation tacking on too many features or tech debt.
In specific sectors I do think we will see more optimization. If you're working on cloud compute or AI training / large scale data processing, there will be a big focus on optimization as prices are very large at that scale and shortages have a bigger effect.
Also in gaming I think the next cycle will be different. Big game studios used to push for the best possible graphics that might require the newest consoles or high end gaming computers, but the next releases might not be as much of an upgrade. The next gen of consoles or graphics cards themselves might be delayed, or be less powerful, or be too expensive and flop, as chip manufacturing companies continue focus on more lucrative markets and leave average consumers behind.
Some programmers will write more efficient code. At my $dayjob (one of the big tech companies) we're already planning a major goal next year of optimizing server code to reduce RAM requirements, and this is directly in response to the crunch.
In practice I expect most optimizations will come from "stop doing stupid stuff" and not "use fancy advanced algorithms." But that's a cynical perspective so don't be cynical like me.
Real, there are so many low hanging fruits for optimization but no one has time to do them. And they don’t incentivize spending your time on it either.
If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.
If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device.
There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier.
Why games? Because there is a clear point where people stop buying games. Minimum hw specs are known before buying.
> If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.
Recently I booted up Insurgency: Sandstorm. With a 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 at 1080p and high graphics, the game runs at around 200 FPS. Meanwhile, pretty much any modern UE5 title (with the exception of Ready or Not and Split Fiction, from what I've seen) runs horribly - the interesting thing is that no matter how much you tweak the .ini files or change the graphics settings you can't get something like STALKER 2 or The Forever Winter or Borderlands 4 to run as well as UE4 with the graphics similar to those old games. Instead you get something that runs at like 10% of the render resolution and still doesn't get 60 FPS (I'm not exaggerating, literally the performance I got in The Forever Winter).
There's no good technical reason for things to be that way (Unity still exists, and the games made in it struggle less) other than the devs or the higher ups choosing higher fidelity but more expensive rendering technologies and using upscaling and framegen not as something that helps laptops or when you need the spare GPU capacity (e.g. encoding a video recording of the game), but rather as something that's supposed to be used to even get to 60 FPS in the first place.
I don't know what needs to change for things to get better.
I also don't see anyone particularly caring about regular software, Electron et al are just too convenient to develop in (having to create per-platform UIs sucks in already-overworked teams).
If you listen to gaming Youtube then the gaming industry is already in trouble from hardware costs and availability. I'm not sure if they are making a mountain out of a mole hill or not though.
> There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier.
Spot on.
Now with LLMs and desktop app libraries such as Tauri, there is little excuse in choosing Electron to build memory hungry apps other than laziness.
Tauri sucks on macOS and especially Linux, because the native browsers are a huge issue. Tauri/Windows uses a recent Chromium engine, which is fine.
Are programmers and their use of data structures driving up storage requirements in games though? Or is it just high poly models and high res textures?
I guess it's not just models and textures. Those should be the easiest to dial down, even optionally with a "low" setting. Maybe making high-res assets an optional download, to reduce game size (ssds are also getting expensive)
That's memory efficient assets, not memory efficient code. The latter is already optimized for the former.
Until prices hit the large hyperscalers, I don't think most people are going to make significant changes. You might see a small set of open source projects related to self hosting put in an effort, but in general, I don't think so.
Some big-tech orgs (that have their own hardware) will take costs into account, but they already do that. The "optimization" is more likely to be business-optimizations; "this can be slower if it uses less memory", rather than inventing new stuff.
Note that I am excluding any of the big AI labs. They are definitely going to be working to figure out how to use less memory, but that's primarily not related to the direct cost.
Programmers might write more efficient code if the performance was unacceptable on their own laptops, but even in the not-flush-with-cash companies I've worked all my career, it's been easy for me to always have a dev laptop with twice as much RAM as most consumers have. I'm presently working on a laptop with 64GB, and we don't even use any local AI models. If a PE company is willing to spec dev laptops like this, even in the memory shortage, then I assume the memory pressure will never hit developers.
So, this carefree attitude directly shapes all code that runs client-side (JS + native apps) since the only impact on the company is whatever happens on the dev's laptop. The rest of the impact is "free" since it's paid (in either money or in misery) by customers.
For server side, I also highly doubt it, as being more memory efficient on the server side has always had a benefit to the company who pays the bill. The only things that may change may be the relative cost, but if management comes and says "AWS bill going up, help?" devs will say "OK, we can find ways to save RAM, but the team won't be doing any new features or fixing any customer-facing bugs during that time" and management will say "Okie dokie, we'll just pay the bigger bill then."
For this incentive to exist, the app needs to be such an obvious memory hog that users start identifying it as the source of the problem.
Even then, a lot is required for most businesses to prioritize this (presumably) temporary issue at the cost of things like: participation in the AI race, other features, bug fixes, new markets etc.
Heck, sometimes software is so inefficient that it costs developer and tester productivity but a fix is not prioritized for years.
Your response suggests that you're only considering native apps where users can view memory usage.
For cloud apps where the costs are largely hidden from users, the user has no way of doing that analysis. I agree with the second part of what you said, though: I expect businesses to just raise their prices in those cases rather than systematically focus on actual difficult engineering problems.
I was thinking about this recently. If you discount web/electron bloat, actually the memory bloat of software isn't hugely terrible.
I still often notice that servers on Linux use <1GB of RAM even with relatively high use. I don't think that's really changed massively in 20 years.
One can certainly wish, but I am inclined to believe that RAM use isn’t just about sloppy programmers. I think it is, to a significant degree, about the kinds of problems we solve now that we have more RAM.
And not all exorbitant RAM use is about sloppiness. Sometimes you can trade more RAM use for lower complexity. Bugs and development time were expensive. RAM was not. So sometimes there is calculation rather than sloppiness behind certain types of heavy RAM use.
Unless users complain it’s not going to happen. Somehow SPA (Single-page application) consume memory as much as operating system.
> will programmers write
Who’s going to tell them?
Well, they're asking on Hacker News, so they're probably asking the broader collective, not just (presumptuously) themselves.
Algorithms and data structures aren't the problem, bundling Chromium to make a chat app is the problem.
I think Rust's rise in popularity will probably lead to some benefits.
Games will probably get more efficient but they're easier to scale down to the memory that's available.
> bundling Chromium to make a chat app is the problem.
Precisely. And all that extra resource wastage is completely free! (paid by your customers).
Perhaps if there were any big software companies who were so iconoclastic as to write fast software and avoid wasteful patterns like using Electron, pressure to do better could be felt, but every company that ships software[1] behaves the same so if anyone tries out competition due to performance beefs, they'll have no relief. They'll be forced to blame their hardware and upgrade it.
[1] Only exception of course is some indie developers. I don't know of any companies that have more than about 2 devs who haven't adopted the 'modern' approach, where we only fix performance issues that completely block using the app.
I've dumped python for anything that doesn't involve scipy / pytorch in favor of go. So yes, I'm having my llm's output go now which is generally more memory efficient than python.
Python isn't even that bad, I have python desktop apps that use 50mb of memory. More than needed but not 1-2gb realm people complain about with electron stuff.
There's hope for the extinction of Electron based apps.
The memory shortage is really for these insane memory requirements for LLMs.
A web browser and the basic mobile app will be fine.
The iPhone 17 Pro has the most RAM and it's only 12GB. Hell the iPhone 16 Pro only had 8 GB. The vast majority of consumer cases don't need it. I doubt Apple and other manufacturers will go beyond that to keep prices down.
I doubt many of the newer generation ever even tried. Maybe they had a course at uni where they did some C or Assembly, but that's probably the extend of it. So no, I don't think so lol.
No. The cost of one programmer’s hour of work compared to the increase in price of RAM is not very big. One is a variable cost one is fixed.
Only if people start buying computers with less memory, if they just buy fewer computers it doesn’t seem worhwhile.
Depends. I can certainly offer to rewrite my old code that contributed to the memory shortage, for a price.
Memory? Doubt it.
But I’m hopefully optimistic that we’ll see a renewed emphasis on speed and responsiveness, since users do notice that despite most products ignoring it.
A few will write low level code that will make all code behave more memory efficiently.
I don't see the trend reversing, but if we're lucky, perhaps a freeze. Won't get more efficient but may not get worse.
No. Customers will pay more across all markets.
what do you mean?
They're answering the question posed in the article: No, programmers won't write more efficient code.
They're suggesting that instead, consumers will just be forced to pay more for inefficient SaaS products being run on more expensive infrastructure.
Will you stop using docker to deploy a simple application? No? Didn't think so.
If the producers see a long term demand for memory they will meet the challenge and produce enough to bring prices down.
Economics will invariably alleviate the memory crunch. It just takes long and requires a huge upfront CapEx.
They have been burned in the past and are hesitant to over invest, worried that the bubble might burst.
I expect high prices to stick around for a while, but I would be surprised if this was permanent.
Which means to me, that price pressure probably won't be the driving force for writing more memory efficient software.
For those who want, I expect AI to make it easier to do that, assuming it's done right, i.e. not vibe coding it.
If you have a subscription to The Economist, I recommend listening to this Money Talks podcast. They talk about the shortage and the economics behind it.
Can anything stop South Korea’s bull run?
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/05/21/can-anything-s...
[delayed]
claude code and friends will make it much easier to rewrite python/js/$memory-hungry code in rust.
and make memory hungry rust code with unsafe everywhere. Way to go!
None of my LLM created rust code has unsafe, or unwrap and must pass clippy checks..
Of course not. Why would they? The software nowadays is mostly written for people who already own computers with RAM already installed. Yeah, they probably won't upgrade for the next couple of years, so what?
Besides, have you heard about "virtual memory" and "swapping"? Nowadays, SSDs (and especially NVMe) are quite fast, so thrashing is much less of an issue.
Programmers won't, but LLMs will.
We're in this situation because of laziness. I doubt doubling down on it is the solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n5E7feJHw0
no
I don't think at this point in history limitations drive the the way we do things, abundance does.
I don't see the underlying economic dynamics of the relevance of substitution costs driving the way we do things going away. And substitution costs are all about limitations.
Abundance and limitations are a bit of ying/yang phenomena in terms of driving things, you don't have one without the other.
Igor Stravinsky: "Constraint drives creativity"
(I also don't see Amdahl's Law --which is fundamentally about limitations -- going away any time soon.)
I do agree that there are compounding abundancies present.
Increasingly, the "what do we have the most of?" questions will return "RAM" less and less often.
No.
Lad, modern day "programmers" don't even know what memory is. You'll be lucky to find any "software engineer" who can even tell you what a pointer is.
I can refer you to some documentation on the topic. ;)