Mathew Lodge, CEO of AI software testing company Diffblue, explains the economic motivation behind enterprise legacy modernization from COBOL to Java.
Opinion
Mathew Lodge argues prompt engineering is a fallacy and merely trial-and-error
“And so the idea that there's something called prompt engineering, engineering in the sense of you're applying an approach because it's going to give you the output that you desire. Is a complete fallacy. At best it's trial and error. It's prompt trial and erro…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lodge: Open-source AI will ultimately defeat proprietary models
“I think so. I think because it allows that level of innovation I just talked about, and I think also it gives people the ability to specialize these models to a particular task.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Diffblue generated 3,100 unit tests in eight hours for a bank
“You know, for one of the banks, they had an application. We wrote like 3100 tests in about eight hours. Now they estimated that that's like a year's work for a single developer, 3000 tests. And we can do that in eight hours.”
Insight
Interactive AI code suggestions are strictly bottlenecked by human review speed
“You could really still only go as fast as a human can go, because a human has to review that, decide whether it's useful or not, if it is useful, make it, fit it into the code and finish the work. You're still basically going at the speed of a human, whereas w…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Diffblue generates unit tests in 1.5 seconds versus 40 seconds for LLMs
“We built a version of our product where we use the large language model to generate all the tests. So we took our reinforcement lending engine out and put in large language model, and we did a lot of work on prompts and so on. And you know, our product will wr…”
Opinion
Lodge: Brexit caused an exodus of UK tech talent
“We had, you know, we had a Brexit exodus of talent where people just said, you know what, I'm just going, I'm going back to France or I'm going back to, you know, wherever.”