Anonymous #1 8w

I can’t imagine cutting out white space would really save that many tokens right?

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Anonymous #2 8w

Perhaps I’m missing something here but in most languages the lexer will remove whitespace such that the compiled/interpreted machine code is equivalent (i.e. executes the same at runtime). I’m not trying to be rude here, have you taken your university’s “programming languages” course (or something of the like)? You can go super in-depth on how the code you write actually gets translated to machine code and executed, but one undergrad class is enough to demystify a lot of things

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Anonymous OP 7w

Little rude 😅 I’m doing about 100k a year as a web dev/admin/consultant while working on my masters? CSS and JS minification basically takes and eliminates “free space” in the file, like above. The part I explained poorly was it’s not that CSS files pause when parsing but that each carriage return adds significant size to the file which overall degrades page speed load times and first contentful paint. Minified code just loads faster. (Almost the same thing)

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Anonymous #2 7w

I mean sure like minified pages have fewer bytes to download/transfer so it’s a bit faster for the specific case of a client loading a webpage downloaded over network, but that’s a much different concept than like literally the code “runs far more efficiently” or a “pause” on carriage returns. And it doesn’t really explain why LLMs do this shit in code that doesn’t need to be minified

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