Faster with Reservations

[brian]

AI models continue to improve. The latest models will try multiple options to find the best one. This ability has enhanced this site. I believe there are no measurable performance optimizations left here. It is time to add features. Today I added Air Quality graphs to the Weather page. Less than 2 hours from concept to production.

The most significant AI-assisted enhancements? The weather graphing engine was 33kb, AI written 7kb. Weather radar uses an animated GIF and breaks it into 10 frames for processing. My code did this in 0.0157 seconds. AI code: 0.0069 seconds; 2.3x faster. That's not the biggest impact...

I used Tesseract to OCR the radar images; to ensure the time displayed was when the image was captured. 28mb of code. I optimized the execution code down to 0.9 seconds.

AI replaced it with a machine learning process. It creates glyphs of the time characters, adding new glyphs when needed. Size? 14kb; 0.05% of what I was using. Speed? 0.00008 seconds; 11,250x faster.

A cautionary tale: AI made mistakes on this journey. Some required me to restore from backup. AI can be reckless and dangerous. I was prepared. For every frustration it caused, it rewarded me with code that would have taken me weeks to write. It's worth the effort, but you must understand what it is doing and be diligent in reviewing.