Quamina and Claude, Case 1

10 days ago

The author, with 47 years of coding experience, shares a case study of applying Claude (GenAI) to their Go library, Quamina.
Rob Sayre, a collaborator, sent PRs that significantly improved Quamina's performance, roughly doubling its speed on benchmarks.
Quamina is a Go library based on finite automata (NFA and DFA) with APIs for adding patterns and matching JSON blobs efficiently.
Performance optimizations in Go often involve minimizing memory allocations by managing slice capacities and reusing slices.
Rob's PRs included standard optimizations and novel improvements, such as precomputing epsilon closures and eliminating sets with closure-generation integers.
Rob used Claude to generate and refine PRs, enabling quick context switches and efficient problem-solving.
The collaboration led to substantial performance gains without semantic changes, tagged as 'kaizen' (continuous improvement) in Quamina's PRs.
The author plans to share more stories, including a Rust port of Quamina and thoughts on Open Source and GenAI.

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