Nikil Viswanathan (@nikil): Potential instant 20-50% computer speedup - open terminal - type "arch" Discover
- Source: https://x.com/nikil/status/2023531845728825482?s=46
- Mirror: https://x.com/nikil/status/2023531845728825482?s=46
- Published: 2026-02-16T22:56:02+00:00
- Saved: 2026-02-17
Content
Potential instant 20-50% computer speedup
- open terminal
- type "arch"
Discovered today that my computer had been running most things ~30% slower for years.
In 2020 @Apple switched Macs from Intel chips to their own ARM chips (M1, M2, M3, M4). To make sure old Intel apps didn't break overnight, they built Rosetta — a translation layer that converts Intel instructions to ARM on the fly. It works so well you don't even know it's there. That's the problem.
When I migrated from my old Intel Mac, Migration Assistant silently copied over Intel @MacHomebrew. From that point on, every single package I installed — Node, Python, my terminal, 200+ developer tools — was the Intel version. Rosetta translated everything seamlessly. No warnings. No errors. Just 30% slower across the board, and I had no idea.
I only caught it this weekend because I was doing a fresh install of @openclaw to test a secret project I'm building. The new update of Openclaw uses node-llama-cpp, which flat out refuses to run under Rosetta. That one failure exposed years of hidden performance loss.
This might be happening to you.
To check
- Open any terminal app installed through homebrew (iterm2, ghostty, etc...). The default Terminal app is installed by the system & uses arm so won't work to test.
- Type "arch" and hit enter
- If it says arm64 — you're good, everything is running native
- If it says i386 — your Mac is running everything through Rosetta and you're leaving 20-50% performance on the table
You can also check specific apps: right-click any app → Get Info → if "Open using Rosetta" is checked (or greyed out), it's running translated.
To Fix
- Open terminal
- Install ARM Homebrew: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://t.co/uxVTms1w67)"
- Reinstall your packages using /opt/homebrew/bin/brew
Go check right now.
⚡️ Godspeed.
