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Had a laptop purchased in December 2024 with 16 GB of RAM. Running a single VS Code instance and Edge with maybe 10 tabs consumed almost 100% of the RAM. Doing any actual development work required me to upgrade to 64 gigs of RAM. Thankfully it required DDR4 SODIMMs and I had two lying around from a recently deceased Mini PC.
I've always found that it's pretty amazing how much effective speed can be gained by thinking about your memory usage and doing things that "don't make sense", such as leaving requests compressed in memory. Even re-compressing them after decryption is "obviously" less efficient than not doing so ... except it' can be faster, even on servers with 192GB ram.

Half the articles on Go vs Java also make this point. "We're so much easier on memory usage than Java's Object and that alone gives us a XX% speed boost".

It also can become an extra layer of protection against thrashing when overloaded.

I wish people put more attention into this.

I am in this bucket too. MSSQL + VS + tested Server + tested Client on 16GB + Win11 will just choke MSSQL server into constant timeouts. But if I will offload MSSQL onto another computer everything works just fine.
I run Windows 10 on a laptop with 16GB RAM and on fresh boot it uses ~2.5GB, which leaves a lot of memory for other stuff, but I guess when even the new Notepad uses 20x more RAM that the old one it makes sense to require 32GB RAM.. One can hope that due to the high price of RAM more effort will be put into reducing memory usage in general, because right now it's ridiculous
I have win 10 iot running on devices with 4gb of ram (they mostly have to run one dedicated app) and it works fine!
Haha, I love such statements.. Well I run old Windows w/ 16GB RAM, and on fresh boot it uses around 128MB RAM, leaving plenty of RAM for apps...

Headless Linux is even better, 3GB RAM, 19MB on boot..

If you are planning to use vibe coded programs then you better plan for a lot of RAM. Well I say planning when its really being thrust upon you in a lot of cases.

But be extremely mindful when looking at anything touched by Anthropic or OpenAI.

These coding agents have terrible feedback cycles for lag and memory leaks. A particularly egregious one is GPU usage which is absurdly high in most of these apps due to terrible design and react render loop issues. Someone needs to make RL enviroments than punish this.

I will caveat this with saying being wasteful with resources is not new at all. But at this point it seems like no one is doing any amount of basic due diligence.

I think that is a bold statement.

It depends on who’s promoting as well as the stack and the app and the complexity.

To be honest (no pun intended here), I’ve actually benefited from finding leaks and optimizing code paths by such tools. As long as something is measurable and testable you can benefit from AI. Worth mentioning, I mostly do C++ code at my work.

At least so far as Microsoft goes, it is abundantly clear that they do not use LLMs like you claim to. The gp comment is an extremely fair assumption.

I'd also wager that people like you are extreme anomalies in general. We are seeing decreasing software quality across the industry. Your statement is the bold one.

The source of the bloat is less vibecoding and more architecture missteps and reliance on using web interfaces for everything.
Genuine question, especially here on HN. Why would a developer use Windows in 2026?

I even develop windows apps. On Linux, built on GitHub actions.

If I had windows forced on me for corp reasons, like I did once, just full screen a VM

> If I had windows forced on me for corp reasons, like I did once, just full screen a VM

Ah, the naivete of the innocent. You are vastly underestimating the amount of spyware like Crapstrike Falcon that the IT department will force on you. And you think that shit runs on a VM?

Consider yourself lucky that you don't suffer Windows at work. I have only a single thought for all Microsoft software: death.

Just an FYI but Crapstrike has a linux client.
The virus spreads.
Because the IT department makes them. Windows (and Mac) have an abundance of turn-key MDM solutions. I did the research to avoid having to use Windows at a previous employer, and there weren't many options (and specifically _any_ that covered 100% of what they wanted).
Developing apps for platform you are not using is just pointless exercise in frustrating your users. If app fails on Windows, how are you going to support your users? You don't have Windows, so you are unable to replicate the error at a first place.
Game development, all those desktop applications that 70% of the market happens to use?

Additionally some of us really enjoy Visual Studio with the .NET ecosystem, the C++ tooling able to do hot reloading, REPL, debug release binaries?

Powershell based tooling.

If you're developing for Windows you should definitely develop on Windows so you can dogfood what your users experience. You don't have to do everything else on Windows.
> Why would a developer use Windows in 2026?

To have somewhat working desktop OS with access to one of the most powerful dev environments in a form of Visual Studio?

This recommendation was targeted to gaming, not office work. And even for gaming, MSFT said 16GiB was good enough for most games.

Sensationalist article which doesn’t belong on HN.

Wasn't it actually talking about if you were gaming and streaming your gameplay and chatting at the same time?
You used to be able to do this with 2GiB.
Gaming is such a broad category. That said not even modern triple A games recommend 32 gigabyte yet.
There are games which have long recommended 32GiB, but primarily simulators.

DCS and MSFS 2024 are two such examples.

Meanwhile the MacBook Neo is amazing with just 8 GB of RAM. I just got it for using as a "thin client" for AI but it can handle at least Godot gamedev without hiccups
My Windows 11 laptop with 32 GB RAM only allows for about 10-12gb user addressable before starting to crash. I do keep a lot of Chrome tabs open so that can easily get to 6-8gb, plus IntelliJ can use another 4-5. Add on VScode, sometimes Firefox or Opera, an email client, some other utilities (or god forbid try opening WSL), and I'm constantly getting crashes. And as I stated, only about 12gb of applications on a 32gb machine. It makes no sense.
What kind of crashes? Could you have bad RAM and the crashes start once the bad chip get put into use?
I would show you task manager showing 100% of user addressable space being used. It seems to reserve at least half of its memory for Windows itself or background processes. What kind of crashes? Applications just shutting down without warning, or Chrome slowing down and struggling to display anything, or itself closing. If there is a setting I could change, I've likely tried it, but I'm open to suggestions.
You need to run memtest.
Spyware and bloat ain't cheap these days.

Linux users don't rejoice too much, the Fedoras and Ubuntus were eating so much of my RAM I had to take refuge in Alpine.

"Linux users" is a pretty big spectrum. My XFCE install uses barely any ram.
CachyOS was using 3.25gb of ram while streaming video at 4k on my system.

My Windows work PC is currently using 28.2 gigs to have outlook, teams and 6 browser tabs open.

Kind of odd an apple to oranges comparison you're making there, streaming video uses hardly any RAM.

How much RAM does CachyOS uses if you're running outlook, teams, and 6 browser tabs open?

There's a LTT video that came out recently that showed Linux using 4-6gb less in equivalent use cases across the board, if that is helpful.
Is it actually using it though or is most of it just cached stuff?
> ... the Fedoras and Ubuntus were eating so much of my RAM I had to take refuge in Alpine ...

The name of the bloat you're looking for is called "systemd".

Even though it's still kinda, sorta, possible to keep a lean Debian install in check (and Debian by default uses systemd), systemd is quite the gigantic kitchen sink. In the Fedoras and Ubuntus it's indeed out of control now.

The one thing that speeds up a systemd Linux booting (and usage) is removing as much of those systemd (dis)services as possible.

P.S: main desktop is Debian + Awesome WM (so I do use systemd)

Debian-like without systemd: devuan. I actually use it instead of gentoo these days for VMs since I dont have to compile everything. Sacrilege, from me, gentoo user since 2005 or so.
systemd has plenty of negatives but it doesn't cause memory bloat.
At least with Linux you have the option to debloat it, because it's your computer.
You might consider MX, it has a much lower footprint for eating ram.
Debian XFCE is still strong with a low amount RAM, too.
They'd have to gave up on huge amount of own bloat to make system work fine again under 8GB. I'm not sure how that can be achieved with Microsoft attitude towards desktop users - they're just a... data cattle for them.
Who can afford that much RAM?

I'm going back to the days when 640k was all we could ever use.

In 640k we lacked a lot of the abstractions we take for granted today, like processes. But NT4 recommended 32MiB.
Given all the other phenomena going on around computing, I may soon go back offline.
I just got a decent HP laptop for my mother (browsing/emails/light videos) for <$1k, it has 32GB. Good deals are out there.
Q: How much of that memory requirement is due to Co-Pilot?
> It has reduced memory overhead across apps and components and has optimized WinUI 3 to make built-in apps use less memory.

Anyone with developer experience with the WinUI 3 mess, knows that until now this is only marketing that Windows outlets keep repeating out from Microsoft corporate marketing.

After purchasing a brand new pre-built from Microcenter (mostly for the GPU & RAM inside), I didn't even boot the Microsoft garbage – started straight into Ubuntu 26 USB installer, formatted, and was up and running immediately. Now this new 5070Ti purrs more-happily...

Sillily, the RGB-bullshit 32GB RAM sticks were cheaper than identical unlits... but I do wish I'd paid more for the latter now, because I'm going to [eventually] have to get inside of these stupid gimmicky LED-covers and tear them all directly off the PCB – so fucking stupid [RGB hardwired onto RAM is, without a physical switchoff].

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tl;dr: I don't care what Microslop does or does not recommend, because I would never in my lifetime be caught using anything post-Win7Pro (if it had to be MSFT).