8 points laginimaineb 3 hours ago 5 comments
laginimaineb 3 hours ago | parent
It sits between your code and the hardware. No humans in the loop! Maxwell makes the code run faster as it runs, without ever changing a single line.
Maxwell sees programs from the inside: traces, profiling information, and the data flowing through them. It adapts dynamically to the environment, including the hardware, what else is running, and what the inputs look like.
Code execution models change the way we approach coding. Today, Claude/Codex (and humans) keep re-optimising code for every different use-case hardware and data flow (think of LLM inference engines, like vLLM!). Our bet is that this is unnecessary, suboptimal, and that it does not scale. Instead, we think the right answer is to make code a living, thinking, thing.
Early access is open at heymaxwell.ai. Happy to answer questions here.
IAmRinSlow 3 hours ago | parent
laginimaineb 3 hours ago | parent
It's really unlike a compiler. For example, for a function like 'sort', the optimisation can:
- Use quicksort if the data distribution is generic.
- Use insertion sort if the data is nearly sorted
And so on... As long as these can be proven sound, Maxwell can pick the best optimisation in real time.
ben_mussay 3 hours ago | parent
gavinray 49 minutes ago | parent
The homepage does not do a very good job of explaining what we're looking at:
It appears to be a combination of two things:
1) A formalization of the Python language
2) An LLM which hooks into running programs and hot-swaps code with verifiably-equivalent behavior but better runtime performance, found via superoptimization and then verified via the formalization rules
This is brilliant, and in hindsight one of those "I can't believe nobody had thought of this yet" sort of things.