The Ledger
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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…”
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.”
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.”
Private equity mainframe software acquisitions and price hikes drove companies to Java
“Because PE companies bought all of those software products and raised the price.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
Mathew Lodge: Developers dislike unit tests because incentives favor feature delivery
“Fundamentally they're not paid to write tests. They're paid to deliver the functionality, the new things in the application that fixes the application, the updates and tests are just there to, as part of the process to help them.”
Lodge: AI code generation mirrors the shift from assembly to compiled languages
“The analogy I like to make is, it's kind of like, ah, the shift, you know, 30, ah, 35 years ago from sort of assembly language to compiled languages, right? So what you did as a developer really changed”
The AI market will shift toward smaller models running without GPUs
“It's one of the reasons I think that we're going to see more smaller models and you've got startups now emerging, which are essentially trying to, like, distill down, like from a large model into something much smaller that will run without a GPU, and they're …”
Lodge: DeepMind shaved 7% off C++ sort algorithm using reinforcement learning
“Google DeepMind has also applied this approach Do things like code optimization, where essentially they're searching for more efficient implementations of a particular algorithm. So they shaved about seven percent off the sort algorithm in the C++ library, whi…”
Lodge: Diffblue uses ensemble of reinforcement learning and LLMs
“Yeah, we, so we use an ensemble approach. So we've got different aspects of the models and we've obviously been playing with large language models to see if we can improve on that process. So some of this is like, how do you make predictions? And you can use l…”