4 ms·
Tobi from Shopify used a variant of autoresearch to optimize the Liquid template engine, and found a 53% speedup after ~120 experiments: https://github.com/Shop
by simonw 8mo ago
Tobi from Shopify used a variant of autoresearch to optimize the Liquid template engine, and found a 53% speedup after ~120 experiments: https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056 https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056
I wrote up some more notes on that here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/13/liquid/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/13/liquid/
- Denzel 8mo agoHow much did this cost? Has there ever been an engineering focus on performance for liquid? It’s certainly cool, but the optimizations are so basic that I’d expect a performance engineer to find these within a day or two with some flame graphs and profiling.
- simonw 8mo agoHe used Pi as the harness but didn't say which underlying model. My stab-in-the-air guess would be no more than a few hundred dollars in token spend (for 120 experiments run over a few days assuming Claude Opus 4.6 used without the benefits of the Claude Max plan.) So cheaper than a performance engineer for a day or two... but the Shopify CEO's own time is likely a whole lot more expensive than a regular engineer!