Seyed Madaeni discusses the development timeline and complexity of building production-grade algorithmic battery storage dispatch and market bidding software.
Opinion
Madaeni: AI will shift software engineering toward prompting, code review, and QA
“At the end of the day, we're flying a plane that's, we're souping up the autopilot system, but I think we still need pilots. And, you know, a pilot with an autopilot system is a different kind of a pilot. So it's mostly about, I wouldn't say essay writing, but…”
Opinion
Madaeni: LLMs are not equipped to build and train neural nets for forecasting
“But it's clear that I don't think that LLMs are equipped with, you know, building a whole neural net from scratch and training them and do some form of supervised, unsupervised learning for Forecasting.”
Opinion
Madaeni: Equivalent battery optimization code manually takes two engineers one month
“Once you want to like grab, put some software foundation, what Duncan has presented today, I would say you need two engineers, more like a backend software engineer and an optimization engineer. And depending on how well they get along with each other, because…”
Insight
Madaeni: Non-domain engineers miss battery physical constraints just like LLMs do
“Batteries can't charge and discharge at the same time, and it's rather obvious to us, but the same applies if we bring a software engineer out of, as an example, out of Uber, where they've never heard about energy problems, can't distinguish between megawatts …”
Insight
Madaeni: Full-year vs daily analysis makes no difference for 4-hour battery dispatch
“If the battery had enough, you know, energy to kind of cycle for a couple of days, if we're thinking about long duration storage distinguishing between a full year analysis versus a daily analysis is important, but if your battery has four hours, then it reall…”
Insight
Madaeni: Building a production battery dispatch optimizer takes a team one year
“If I think about the initial problem, which takes a year for a souped up team to build and productize, I originally reduced the complexity to 50% by ignoring all of the bidding stuff. And from the 50% that was remaining the insular services are probably like 4…”