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Agent Swarms and Knowledge Graphs for Autonomous Software Development with Siddhant Pardeshi

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Agent Swarms and Knowledge Graphs for Autonomous Software Development with Siddhant Pardeshi

Blitzy, founded by Sedant Paardeshi, is tackling autonomous software development by dynamically recruiting swarms of agents that use a database as part of the orchestration layer, avoiding a single orchestrator. This approach allows them to generate hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code that compile, run, and pass tests. The key challenge is moving beyond code generation to full software engineering, especially for enterprise codebases, where code acceptance is critical. Paardeshi explains that while specs help anchor agents, they are insufficient due to evolving dependencies and unknowns during development. Blitzy overcomes context limits of LLMs through context engineering (providing the right information at the right time) and agent engineering (recruiting the best agent for each task). For example, they built a hybrid graph and vector index that maps the entire codebase, enabling instant navigation across 10 million lines without burning tokens. This contrasts with traditional tools that rely on shallow indexing and struggle with large-scale changes. Despite advances, human-in-the-loop remains necessary for decision-making, but the vision is for more intelligent models to handle architectural decisions autonomously in the future.

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A big thanks to Blitzy for supporting the podcast and sponsoring this episode. Want to accelerate software development velocity by 5x? You need Blitzy, which brings autonomous software development to your enterprise code base. Your engineers declare intent and Blitzy agents map your code base and generate an agent action plan. Once approved, Blitzy gets to work, autonomously generating hundreds of thousands of lines of validated end-to-end tested code, more than 80% of the work completed in a single run. Blitzy is not just generating code, it's developing software at the speed of compute. Experience Blitzy firsthand at Blitzy.com/twiml. That's B-L-I-T-Z-Y.com/twiml. The approach that we took has been to dynamically recruit multiple swarms of agents and use the database as part of the orchestration layer. And you can recruit tens of thousands of agents but not have to worry about this single orchestrator that's keeping track of everything that's happening. We've been able to apply that successfully and we frequently write hundreds of thousands of lines, millions of lines of code, everything compiles, everything runs, all tests pass, the UI works, it's pixel perfect. It's a ripple effect, it's a ripple effect, it's actually. [Music] All right everyone, welcome to another episode of the Twiml AI podcast. I'm your host Sam Sharrington. Today I'm joined by Sedant, Paardeshi. Sedant is co-founder and CTO of Blitzy. Before we get going, be sure to take a moment to hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening to today's show. Welcome to the podcast, Ed. Thanks Sam, glad to be here. I'm a long time listener. I've been listening since 2019. That's amazing and it is so great to hear. I am excited to meet you. And I'm really looking forward to digging into your experiences at Blitzy where you're working on autonomous development. Let's dig right in but start by talking a little bit about your background. You were at Nvidia before you started Blitzy? Yeah, I was at Nvidia since 2016, January 2016 and back then. The day I joined Nvidia's stock was with the 32 billion. That was Nvidia's market gap. 30 billion dollars. And I think anthropics revenue today is more than that. It was much more than that. Experience, you know, beating it at Nvidia at that time. And Nvidia was structured. I don't know if they still are, but it functioned very much like a startup for the entire time that I was there. Right from 2016 to 2022 and I, you know, when the attention is all you need, people robbed. I was right there. I was inventing things for Nvidia in the generative AI space. I was deep into gans or generative adversarial networks and various auto encoters. And I was brushing with NLP. It was still quite early. You know, you had you had bird. We were using bird for like translation and stuff like that. The transformer was groundbreaking tech. And eventually when I realized the potential of what it could do and simultaneously had an opportunity to go to HBS. To do a joint masters program in an MBA and an MSI. I chose that. And I met Brian at HBS, my co-founder and CEO and we decided to farm glitzy based on the idea that AI will catch up eventually with humans. And you know, we made this bet back when the context window was about 10,000 tokens and it could barely write like usable code, right. And we made this bet that AI is going to be as good if not better than humans at writing code. And there'll be a section of software development. That's not just about code generation, but entire software engineering that will get completely automated by our normals to love it. And that's what pleats is all about. It certainly is true that one of the areas where AI is having the most impact today is in software development. When you think about software development, do you have a way that you taxonomize the space and the opportunity. So I think software development is the best opportunity in space for to apply AI. And the reason for that is because software is verifiable. It's compilable. It's testable. You can visualize it and there is the concept of a correct answer. There could be many correct answers, but there are correct answers and wrong answers, which is not always the case in other domains. So it's super important to get, you know, to realize that. And then if you think about the space itself, I think we all got started with AI assisted development, right. Copylates today, you have CLIs and IDEs, ID tools with embedded AI assistants and they all have the ability to, for example, do tasks asynchronously. Like, for example, you can give it a job that will take even an AI, maybe like our complete. And it will think for some time, go off asynchronously, ask you follow questions and whatnot. And then you have another part of the space, which is about autonomous development. There are tools in this category. There is, I believe, Devon from cognition that falls into that category, be operating that category. And the idea here is that you hit build and outcomes of PR, right. But the PR that comes out is already tested, validated, everything works. And it's exactly how you intended it to be. There's no errors. The code is acceptable. So the biggest challenge that we have on both sides of the spectrum is code acceptance, right. You can write a little of code and code is a commodity now. Like getting AI to write code is very easy. Getting any code is easy. Getting code that follows your standards, codes that code that is really good. It goes as secure code that is ready for production is a completely different story, right. Because you have on one hand, you have these pre-infield builds or like new products that you can build from scratch. And AI is really good at that. So if you look at the demos that the labs put out, hey, I build this, this, you know, game. And it looks amazing. I can't believe it. But then when you put the same AI on an enterprise code base and you're supposed to work with the extra. It's a lot more challenging. It's it's it's way more challenging. It's an orders of magnitude high problem because the AI is dealing with so much information and so many and conditions that causes tools to fail. So the autonomous part of the spectrum is is is is a much harder challenge because you have to simultaneously address all of these items and work for acceptance as your final metric. And so thinking back from acceptance through the agent the AI writing some code on the other side of that. There's got to be some specification that the code has to meet in order to be accepted. Are you essentially pushing all the complexity of coding into spec development. That's a that's a great point. So yes and no. Let me explain the yes part like if you could write a spec, then you should write a spec, right. It's all of the tools we know and love have plan mode. You know, they've recently realized that we said we when we started doing that back in 2020, 2024 when we built a blitzy but spec development. This really helps the agents anchor themselves. But again, what people realize immediately is that the spec is not good enough because then you have these other general rules that you want agents to follow. And traditionally what people have done is use things like ages.md at it scales and other stuff trying to keep the spec light weight because these models tend to forget right after period of time. Or if you go through compaction stuff like that. So there's so there's that part where if you have a task in general that you can write a spec for you know what it should do. You know all of the conditions that it needs to satisfy then yes writing a spec is great. But then you have this other class of tasks where it's not really clear what the dependencies are like for example, you don't know the schema for the back end database looks like. And you can't write a spec for it because you don't know what the constraints are right and you you can't just trust the AI to okay figure out the schema and then do X because you're going to get new information when you figure out the schema right and that's going to affect the decision and the architecture of the code that you're writing right. So because of that you always have this spectrum where you're working one to one with the agent it's giving you more information and you're helping it make decisions right. So does the future if you can build more intelligent models that are maybe human like or better than humans at making architectural decisions then yes you can have like this entire class of work for that is focused on writing specs and guiding other maybe less capable cheaper faster agents to write code. So that also is an exciting opportunity for the future. So just to replay that to make sure I understand I think what you're saying is that yes you're your yes the spec is important because if you get the spec right that anchors the agent and the agent can produce better code. But no today a spec isn't sufficient. because there are assumptions and unknowns and things that evolve during the course of development. And so rather than pushing everything to the spec, what I heard in there was that there's still a lot of human and loop during development, which raises a question, A, is that right? Is that capturing what you're saying, but also then be, you know, you talk a lot about this idea of autonomous development. If the human is in the loop, how autonomous is the development? How do you think about that distinction and nuance? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So the thing is, even if today, let's frame it this way. So today, if you want to get, even if you have a great spec, you spend a lot of time writing a spec, but if it's an obligated spec that maybe covers 50,000, 100,000 lines for which enterprise projects are often at that scale. If you want to migrate, if you want to upgrade Java for a large code base, or if you want to add a UI on a complicated backend, those are huge, huge changes across multiple files. You can have a spec, you can try to spec, you can give it to the agent, your favorite CLI, maybe cloud code or whatever. It's going to spend time executing, but at some point, it's going to run into a use case where it has a question from the human, where something with talk clear needs to make a decision, or it's going to run through several context compactions because it only has like 1 million tokens of context. And then the quality of the output after compaction is not the same information will be lost. Yes, information will be lost. It has to do that. It does do a very intelligent job of trying to retain all relevant information, but it's not perfect, because it's really hard to solve that. And even if you do that, there's no guarantees, it's not going to lose anything that's important. And then if it does spend time in going back and getting back something upon that at last, it chances are that it's so big in size and volume of tokens that is going to go into context again, it's stuck in a loop. That why you had, for example, anthropic put out this huge project, that is a C compiler. And the very first issue, not very first, but the most popular issue on that forum is that this repo should not exist because a hello world is not compiled on this compiler. So you have problems like that when you try to apply what is called the Ralf-Vigum loop to, existing tools, if you're not designed for that. The Ralf-Vigum loop is essentially just running the same thing again and again that gets to the correct answer. The point I'm trying to make is it's not just about sending, giving AI aspect. It's all about context engineering and agent engineering. So context engineering is about giving the AI the right amount of context at the right time. The problem with what happens is at scale across the enterprise when you have like hundreds and thousands of developers, not everyone is using the tool with the same level of efficacy. So all of the CI tools, codex.co, you name it, require a significant amount of setup or like you have you connected to the right MCP, I using the right skills, I using the right prompts. The same prompts that work for Anthropic don't work for OpenAI. For example, OpenAI doesn't use XML tokens in their training but Anthropic does. So if you use XML tokens with OpenAI or if you shout in your prompts, which you have to do with cloud at times, you have started cloud to get it to you. It's an ineffective strategy and then but what it's widening it held that GPT 5.3 gets many things right that Opus is not. So there's all of these complex, agentic engineering. So that's the part that is agent engineering where you recruit the right agent with the right set of prompts and tools with the right level of prompt engineering for the right task. Because there are definitely tasks that GPT is better than Opus 4. And then there's complex engineering which optimizes for giving the agent the right amount of information at the right time and getting it focused on the smallest possible task that is efficient for that agent without like overdoing it or underdoing it. So when you apply those two at scale and you solve some of the most important challenges like for example context limits. So we have a very creative solution internally at least for speaking for Blitzy where we've achieved effectively infinite context because we've applied contact engineering and agentic engineering. So these are really powerful techniques and tools that you can apply with today's AI to achieve a promise to welcome which you've done successfully. Maybe we can jump in and define when you say autonomous development what exactly that means for you like talk through the process from the perspective of a customer or user and what they're doing and what you know what they see the way in which they're engaged. Yeah so that's a good idea so I can talk about how you would do let's say a task like a Java app right it's very easy to think of modernizing or maybe like a gobble to Java transition or even new feature development using traditional versus I'm calling it even traditional let's say it's like state of the art because it's almost developed right. With the typical development workflow even let's say you're assuming using codex or cloud code you would work out a spec for the program and then you would probably use maybe you'd prompt cloud code for the requirements. It would enter plan more build a spec you would then take that spec hop to codex ask it to review it right and then you know you hope that you've written the right set of follow the right prompting guidelines given it the right amount of context had search your code be find all of the relevant information and then build that net that plan right but what what frequently happens and even even during spec generation what happens is when you have a very large code base the tools that these you know are the tools that don't use like various deep indexing techniques they're reliant on you know like shallow indexing you know what I mean by shallow indexing is like build it minutes they'll finish indexing codebase in minutes so they're not building a very deep understanding of the codebase or relationships in the codebase so they're going to rely on tools like GREP to find stuff so okay I want to change the authentication provider as part of this feature that I'm adding and I'm going to find all functions that use auth in a 10 million line code base. Now the challenge is that maybe auth is a very important use case for this project and there's like thousands if not tens of thousands of places where the auth provider is used right and not all functions are named login right so relying on the intelligence of the model to find all these places and get them correctly right update them correctly right and quite often that's where it falls down so it misses places and then when you when if you were to put that plan forward eventually when it tries to compile it will make a mistake it won't be able to compile right and it tried to fix the bugs and now it's going back on its plan and then you know it's changing things that were not exactly in the plan so you have this this problem you're going against the plan because the plan was not perfect right and even to get this plan correctly you had to go to maybe three different riders like Claude GPT Gemini whatever it is so that's one challenge now let's see you got the plan back next you now have to execute the plan you have to like standard and define tasks execute the tasks but if if it's a very complex project right each task could take maybe ours if it's really really complex it could take this right and then you have the concept of maybe sub-agents that you're running maybe in parallel maybe C really but it's really really hard to figure out what task would be run parallel series and what are the you know overlaps between them because you may have agents working against each other right and then you when you have a difficult complex situation where you don't know what to do even though you have a plan you know find yourself going back to the human and relying on the human to you know guide you and do all that and then even from the standpoint of let's say giving the agent the right tools like for example you want the agent to test life so maybe you'll use the and it's a web app for example so you'll maybe you'll give it the Chrome MCP a boom you've just lost 20,000 tokens because of the contact right because it's going to sit in your context window and I may apply like techniques like tool search etc that may optimize that but there's a caveat right if you search for tools it's not going to be as efficient there are chances that it'll miss finding the right tool because it doesn't work so you have that problem you could and then maybe you have like five different MCPs right and each of these five MCPs if they are maybe as complex as as Chrome is you've just lost 100,000 tokens and the effective frontier of operation for these LLMs is still less than 100 to 150K right even though they have 1 million tokens of context the the point I'm making is by the needle in a haystack leader board if you go and look at that there tons of them if the moment you load more than it used to be like 40K but now it's like with opus 4.6 is like 80K 100K tokens you lose the ability of the agent to perform at its best so if the leader board if that agent can track up everything that's in the context window very well exactly right so you load it up this spec but now you've also load it up this all this other stuff and then I haven't even gone into your skills and your agents are MD yet right and then how do you when you have this million line codebase with multiple modules and it worked upon by different teams and every team has a different ages.md file for that module and there are tons of skills, right? You get the problem that I'm getting at. You're easily going to lose the efficient frontier and now you haven't even loaded your actual files yet that you're going to work on, right? I see you've adequately painted the picture of the complexity that you're dealing with with the traditional workflow. Like, what are the things that you can do to overcome all these many challenges? So one thing that we've done from the beginning is build an anchor point that the agents can use to ground themselves in the codebase and to find things across the codebase. Like, for example, we've built a hybrid, you know, graph and a vector that where you have this ingestion process with let's see, for example, that where it understands the entire codebase maps other relationships, does semantic summarization in aggregation and now you have this map of the entire codebase. So if I want to go from one point to another point that's like 10 million lines deep, I can do that instantly in one request rather than burn all these tokens to travel through different files and find the chain, right? So that's like one technique that really works. What you just described, in a lot of ways like flies in the face of the way we've seen the traditional tooling evolve. Like, we started with rag, which was based on, you know, and you know, people don't think about it like this, but to a large degree, you know, the early co-pilot versions were kind of rag based. There was like semantic, you know, vector style, you know, searching across the codebase and identifying chunks and passing that on as context. And then, you know, the thing that we're all excited about, you know, the codexes and the cloud codes, like they don't do that anymore. They just do grep what you're saying, like, doesn't really work at scale. It's interesting to, it's interesting to think about you know, that the kind of give and take that's happening here. And, you know, what you're saying is that you need more sophistication to operate, or at least what I'm interpreting you saying is that you need more sophistication to operate at, you know, enterprise scale, large scale code bases, whatever, you know, we want to call this seat. You know, to bring that to a question, you know, maybe do you have a sense for like where the the cliff is, you know, if you're working with, you know, above a certain amount of code, a certain number of lines of code, or certain, you know, we have characterised in a complexity where, you know, grep stops work and you need to go back to, you know, vector or graph. I would say that the way we've applied vector and graph is in combination with grep. So you use use it like a signal, all right, like, and you go to find my and you're finding for your searching for your airport or a tag, you know, how it gives you a direction, and then you go down the direction, you find the thing, it doesn't really wait exactly is, right, but that is insanely helpful. It's exactly that way. So like combining both. So semantic I'm taking as the thing that gets you directionally close and then grep is the thing that gets you to the exact line, but it's like you're able to reduce your search space using semantic exactly. Okay. And so that, you know, when you combine these techniques and then you ask for like, what is the threshold? Well, I would say if the code base is anything larger than two times your context window, just just just roughly, right, every model provider uses different techniques for compaction, different like, you know, settings, different types, different styles, whatever, I'll go to them and all that. And two times your effective context window or your maximum context window. I would say maximum because, you know, the newer models, they're really good at even the needle in the haystack, right? So even though the effective is smaller, they've gotten, you would get a good enough result. But in general, you know, by rule of thumb, if you're if you're to put it that way, if you're doing a change that's more than, you know, let's say 10,000 lines, right? In a repo, that's more that's around or more than 70k to 100k lines. Then that's where the advantages of having this rack support clearly become evident because the amount of time you're spending searching is going to go down drastically because, you know, you know, in with 70k, 100k lines of code, you probably have multiple modules at that point, right? And you have multiple teams working on it with different sets of rules. So you can really take advantage of going multi-agentic, which you talk about separately, but also having these two anchor points in searching things. So multi-agentic, where does that come in? Yeah. So if because you have these limitations with complexity, right? Where both task complexity and limitations in terms of effective context is by the way, it's not changing, right? So the effective you've gone from 10,000 tokens to 1 million tokens and you've gone from, you know, maybe 10,000 to 200k tokens and then 1 million, but we've been stuck at 80k to 100k tokens of 80k to 120, I would say the latest models since two years. So even though you're getting a new model, I've been three months, the effective context window is not changing and it's taken a while for us to go from 10k to 200k to 1 million, right? Because you have physics constraints in these. You have the amount of compute capacity, you have power, you have how much we can scale for all of these model providers. So they're always trying to find out better solutions for that, but that's not getting solved in the next three months, six months or even I would say in my opinion that's not changing drastically even in the next three years. So these are very important considerations. So what happens if you have multi agent capabilities, the ability to recruit multiple agents and we've seen two techniques that have been applied. One is the concept of having sub agents. So you have one, you know, orchestrator or leader model that is going to recruit multiple sub agents. I've seen this used in Cloud Quote, for example, and then you can do searches in parallel, right? If you're finding four different things, this run for agent, you know, see which one comes back like like throw four dot c which one sticks. You can do that kind of stuff. And then or you can do like you can parallelize tasks, right, give one to a front end, give one to a bracket agent and get more work done. So you can do that kind of stuff. The advantage you have is of course speed, right? Of course, maybe the effect of intelligence because you're doing multiple things in parallel. And you also have a significant, I would say, with not sufficient, a significant improvement in the amount of context you're using with the high-reson because it's no longer having to make all these searches and traverse the code, right? It's getting the result from different agents. So that's more effective than this guy just having to do it himself. But then you still have a bottleneck and the bottleneck is this leader agent, right? Because everyone's going to report back so you can't run hundreds of agents because then you're going to run you go back and compress the context, but you've not overcome the context as a barrier, as a limitation of fundamental limitations. Yes, you just kick the can essentially. Yeah, but you have something. Right. So the other one, so that still falls down when the code base is large enough, right? For multi-millions of lines, you're not going to be effective at using Cloud Code and just get it to do everything like like I just said earlier in the call, you can't even build a hundred K line C compiler with Cloud Code even with Office 4.6. So the approach that we took a long while ago and our approach has been to dynamically recruit multiple swarms of agents and use the database as part of the orchestration layer, right? So we know that you have a spec you're working towards executing the spec. You break that down using AI into tasks and then use different sets of agents for tasks. So now because you've and you do that recursively, right? So once you've done that, you've now gone into the point where you have an efficient task for every agent and you can recruit tens of thousands of agents, but not have to worry about this single orchestrator that's keeping track of everything that's happening. Right? You can parallelize at scale just like GPUs work and I know how GPUs work. I was at Nvidia. So you can you can get that effect, right? Rather than having multi-threading, which is the effect of the other one, you really have like hyper scaling, right? So that is what I believe is the future. And we've been able to apply that successfully and we frequently write hundreds of thousands of lines, millions of lines of code, everything compiles, everything runs, all tests pass. The UI works. It's pixel perfect. So we've perfected that really. So when I think about this analogy of going from multi-threading to parallelization or distributed computing in general, like I think about where some of the challenges are and you get to issues like concurrency and locking and things like that. And in this context, I'm thinking of, you've got many, many agents operating at scale on adjacent you know adjacent tasks like how do you prevent them from stepping all over each other's work? That's a great point. So Number of techniques, you know, and that's that's that's the real problem. That's what we're dealing with then and then they out But number of techniques that help with that, you know like having multiple environments So giving the agent not just one but multiple environments to operate in which are sandboxed right and then converging the result like using the source code like ultimately every Asian for example is committing to GitHub And every agent is going down this chain and figuring out if this path actually works right and then from periodically revisiting the code and checking if it's still compiles which still reaches the spec Like for example, we will run periodic code reviews internally before even giving the code to the user. We have agents that review all of the code and make sure it's not drifting right we have agents that test all of the code queue agents And then we have different developer agents that address the feedback right so those are a few ways where you can design use agent design as a lever and you know we'll use the combine with the SCM user as a source of truth Push comments look at what happened look at agent trajectories understand what went what what was the rationale of making a change right so you don't overstep And then you have this other part which is the graph database Because you have the relational mapping of the entire code base in that where you have the files and you know which file depends on what an imports with library And what is the version of that library and what is the reason that library is used like having that anchor is extremely huge it's a game changer right so you can immediately ground every single agent in that ground truth right so the Because the agent is less confused and has access to this treasure of information it is much more effective and less likely to step on every other agent stores because then every other agent is also operating on the nodes of this graph right so you can design systems that way if you have something like this and so in this world when you talked about these agents you talked about them doing distinct things Are the I guess I'm trying to get at the degree to which the agent you know roles you know or personalities or whatever we want to call them like are these fixed or these dynamic are they you know is something that you spend a lot of time You know from a you know prompt engineering context engineering perspective like you know this is a code writing agent and we're going to you know streamline all that's prompting around that this is a code of you agent and we're doing that Or does the agent figure these things like is the agent a generic concept and it figures these things out based on its task yeah, that's a great point so we you know when we started all our agents were 100 like they were static Because the models just weren't smart enough like we were working with cloud 3.5 3.6 so on For a world all together different world yeah, we didn't even have to call it by the way and we started so it was crazy But then as Asian got as agents got really really smart so what we have today is we have a set of based guidelines and we try to keep that as lightweight as possible so that we don't take up too much space in the context when I say lightweight I mean less than 5,000 tokens which is incredibly hard to do The other level we have is the prompt guidelines we have the references the URLs to where these guidelines are posted And we've given agents the ability to look up prompt guidelines You can tell when I'm getting to with this so you the agents look up the prompt guidelines And then you have fully dynamic agent designs in the latest version of our platform The agents design the agent so you have a set of tools that we've implemented you have a set of MCPs or you know external tools integrations All that up pre written so we we write all of the tools and we write we've written the harness We built we set up the environments we don't give agents direct access to the SCM or the database or stuff like that because we all know what agents can do they have you know in it The access but we do have tools that the agents can use and these tools could be like for example Making a request to push a change to origin right or pulling the latest changes from a branch Making a commit making an edit to a file on that that that kind of stuff like running Speeding up a browser that kind of stuff. So we write the tools and then the agents Look at the the spec And even like portions of the spec right because we have assigned different parts of it to different agents And then they decide What agent would be most Better suited to solve this task because what you've seen is you know what we constantly seen in the transformer architecture And agents around it is that if you give an agent to persona and then give it a mission with a dedicated set of tools It's performance is going to be vastly different than an agent who wasn't for example given the same thing Like just you just go to Claude and just give it something the The kind of response the kind of techniques it follows a thinking process the reasoning process right It's quite a lot of the magic of the intelligence and the models comes from reasoning right And more they think and it's not just about the volume or the quantity. It's more about like the quality of their reasoning Right and that is impacted by the persona So it's super important to give to recruit agents I would say design agents with the right persona and the right set of tools that does not overload the context We have checks and plays to to check like okay when this agent fires up How much context is it going to load up and is it does it still operating the effective context window right and when you design that like you You've designed a function that does all of that. That's when you release all this work combined with the other stuff right combined with Uh the ability to recruit these agents at scale like being able to design a sign and then get them to track progress And then move the job forward like that's that's what we do rain and day out When you talk about agent personas it makes me think of this idea of like starting your prompt with you are an expert copywriter Right this this thing and we we saw a lot of that I think early on and then I think we saw a step away that Away from that but it almost sounds like your experience is that Giving the agent a strong kind of professional identity if you will is an important part of his performance Do you still include that kind of Verbige in prompts? Yes, so we you know over the cause of history. We've had a lot of Improvements and changes in prompts during like like one thing we move away from is like you know Longer need to tell the agent that's a people will die if you don't get this right We're old The reason I kill a lot of people in my life, you know in for for for this particular reason in this prompt We're I'm glad with through that but when it comes to you know, we have we have internal evils That we use to evaluate the performance of lm's and agents at scale right and we know exactly what One line of instruction would do to an agent's trajectory and what we've seen time and again is that giving it All right the right persona Writing your prompts in that language changes things like for example, we worked with the bank and The agent we we were writing documentation for the bank And the agent did not have the persona for financial export So the language and terminology it ended up using in writing the comments Were not to the liking of the bank and then we did the same thing but change the persona of the agent writing the documentation It drastically improved the outcome because it was using terms That the the developers at the bank understood right so that's the change you can affect by doing this by tuning The part of the interesting yes, I've heard it described as like you've got this You know this entire semantic space of the model and by kind of telling it its role like you kind of put it in the right Semantic neighborhood for the task. Yes. Yes. That's that's exactly what this plays at And we've seen this time and again in our e-vals and in real world situations The reason people don't Advise about doing it anymore because for most of the general day-to-day use cases You don't need it right maybe you get good enough performance But when you're going at hyper scale at really complex enterprise use cases Then this is one of the small things that really helps and the other thing we're seeing recently is Research that says that agent md can actually be counterproductive. Do you have any Experience our insights into into that 100 percent. I think we know I also described this earlier Agents or md. I don't believe in scale. It can work for the smaller code basis So I define you know threshold as 70 to 100 k lines Agents or md should be great, you know Less than that right because you can have a flat file. Maybe you have one to three teams that are working with that code base And you can capture all of the guidelines there right but it cannot general you cannot use text to generalize you know you cannot Like put all of the learnings of that teams developers in the single file and expected to generalize across the entire code base No matter how intelligent the model is right is just working within sufficient information and like I described earlier There are so many other things that are competing for attention right so it's really hard for the agent to prioritize and especially when it leads to a conflict. So for example, we had the situation internally. So we use the zero-wheel-blit-c, right? And we have a rule that says in Python, only use fakes and not mocks for writing tests. You can think of that as a ratio in short MD. But then in the code base, we've extensively used mocks, right? And we have another instruction that says, always mimic the patterns that we've already used in the code base. Right? That's what it is. The agent to do, right? So what is happening is it's going to use fakes sometimes and mocks sometimes and it all on you, right? So those are some of the challenges why agents on MD is not effective and as someone pointed out rightfully, maybe even counterproductive in many cases. But in most of the vast majority of the smaller-scale use cases, it's a pretty effective technique. Yeah, interesting. And that context to reflect on how much of working with agents is task and context dependent. Like a lot of, you know, a lot of, we throw around a lot of directives like you should thou shalt, you know, prompt like this, thou shalt prompt like that. But I guess it really just comes back to the importance of evals. Like, you know, just because you see something out on, you know, on X or whatever, doesn't mean it necessarily applies to your case. Maybe you should test it, but run it through your e-vals week. Yeah. And I think you hit a very important point one that's way close to my heart. E-vals, I think, have been consistently underperforming and are not good enough. So just today, or just yesterday, I believe, openly, I released an article on memo where they said we've stopped testing on C-bench verified because the problems are not well defined. And they're the, they're the contributed in creating C-bench verified, right? They realized that gap. So they're not testing on C-bench pro. But even if you look at models that perform similarly on a C-bench verified or C-bench pro, a terminal bench for that matter, right? Which is some of the very popular leaderboards. If you test them in real world performance, the results are vastly different. Like for example, Gemini and Anthropic. I love both of these models. But if you give them the same problem, they have similar scores, right? Ladies' options. But if you give them the same problem and you look at the code, they write without any additional instructions, right? Like don't, don't give it. Don't try to influence what it's doing. So Gemini tries to take a more creative, verbose approach that might be preferable to some people. But Opus tries to be take a completely different approach. It's a small precise. It's more, you know, and it depends on how you prompt it and stuff like that. But those differences are very significant in the real world because it's really hard to prompt the agent for every single possibility, right? Like how it's supposed to be like if you're doing that, then what is the difference? Is your work playing in the agent? The whole point of all this is let the agent figure it out. And because of that, and none of the leaderboards captured that, right? So you have no, you can look at a leaderboard. To some people, this has to do with intelligence. Like this is, this has a bearing on intelligence. Like for example, if you're writing 100 lines for what should have been a one line job for a principal engineer, they will be like, this person is just not smart. For a few, right? So, so that's my point, right? So even though the leaderboard, you can get, you eventually get to a correct answer, the trajectory is better. Your style matters, your approach matters because eventually you're thinking about scaling, right? That's what engineers are doing. Thinking about scale, designing systems so that you don't just solve today's problems, but you'll bring up future problems. And the choice of the model really matters there. So we're, you know, we're also trying to build our own, like trying to make public our own internal e-vails and contribute to this space. But I think e-vails is the next most, definitely the most exciting space because what we're seeing now is, let's say a couple years ago, anthropic, or even a year ago, and anthropic was like a clear leader, right? In the code generation coding space. But now we've seen that OpenAir has definitely caught up. And we're probably even seeing, you know, open source and even Google play catch up in many of these areas, right? So the importance of having really good robust e-vails is very, very crucial because even the labs are using these, right, to improve their own models. The other techniques that the lab uses, they work with smaller companies like us to, you know, test their, give us early access, test their models on the e-vails and get feedback. So it's all a race to build the most modest, best model that works in every real world use case. But the e-vails don't represent the real world. It makes me wonder, you know, when talking about how, you know, just how task-specific model performance can be, it seems like that would cause a lot of challenges for you or create a lot of challenges for you in terms of task decomposition and assignment. Like, how do you know what model to give the task to? If it's not, you know, if the model's performance isn't going to be dependent just on the class of task, but also on the content of the task. Do you find that or is it, is it, in fact, you know, sufficient to categorize by class? I mean, in some senses, that's maybe the best you could do anyway, but. So that's a fair point. If you work with too many variables, it's hard to get to a solution. So what you need to do is make some of them constant. Like, we make the content constant. We make the prompt constant. But then the challenge there is, how do you know it's actually constant if the prompting guidelines are different, right? So what we do is we decide that we'll pick an LLM and let that be the final judge and let it write the prompts. So we write the prompt in English for the evil and then let the LLM improve the prompt based on the latest guidelines, which are static. We download them and feed them. And then now you have a prompt that is written following all of the guidelines that the multiviral recommends, right? And you have the instructions of the task. What we're supposed to do is constant, right? And then you run the model on that task and that task could be like building a front-end, representing the Figma, like having fidelity with the Figma, or it could be like building this new API, or it could be like getting a codebase to compile and the codebase has like tons of errors. Like you stimulate, like, for example, age is messed up and now you have to go and clean up like in the codebase. So let's just having a bunch of two do comets, right? But some of them are actually good and some of them are like wrong. You can create like real world e-walls, like e-walls that mimic the real world and are really complex. They touch multiple files. There are maybe millions of lines writing you can use synthetic data to create such e-walls. And then you look at the traces and understand or evaluate models against multi parameters. Like one is that they ultimately get to the right answer. Yes. Okay. How many tokens did it burn? How many compactions did it go through? What was the total time it took to achieve all of this, neglecting the time spent in like round trips, right? Stuff like that, right? You can look at that and then you can look at the reasoning traces and try to understand like how quickly did the model get to the point where it understood what the problem was, right? And how much of that was actually influenced by the harness? Like where are tools ineffective at mistreating the model, right? They mistreat the model or what is something else, right? So you can change parameters like this, evaluate the model's behavior based on that and ultimately make a go make a decision. Okay. Even though let's say maybe our tools are ineffective, maybe the problem itself is very complex. But despite the challenges, we have this model that did extremely well. It took it burned much fewer tokens. It made lots more tool calls and it made an informed decision in deciding this. So if this was a real world project, I would rather work with this model, right? And this is the use case. If you have multiple different use cases like this, you're using different skills, right? Like for example, when I mean skills, I don't mean the skills that are not popular in court basis, I mean skills of the model, skills of the Asian. So visual comprehension is a skill computer use is a skill, right? So you can use these native features, maybe it's a better word of the model. You can test against these by building the appropriate real world e-vals. So we've talked quite a bit about how you approach automated or autonomous development. Let's talk a little bit about the output of this effort. How do you know it works? You get code. It has to compile. Sure, we get that. You can run lenders against it. You can run it through test suites. Are you presumably doing all these, the agents are doing all these things in an automated way? But it strikes me that there's also the potential for something else, whether you call it like a smell, vibes, whatever. How do you characterize other characteristics of software and how do you evaluate for that kind of thing? Yeah, that's a great question. Number one, I'll talk about how we do it at BTC because it helps. me anchor this. So when we at the end of the project, right, when you're supposed to be done with you're ready to produce your PR or you're finding output, we create what is called a project guide. And that project guide is based on analysis of the code base and it tracks relatively initial spec how much of the project could be completed autonomously, right? And we always think about production. We're not thinking about the code. We're thinking about the client and the enterprise. That's taking this to production, right? So how much time have does the enterprise need to spend on this code base to take it to production regardless of what the initial spec said, right? And we look at how many how much of that time have we now completed autonomously based on what we can see in the code, right? And we give it a completion metric. And we say that in majority of the cases are when you say we are you saying we from the perspective of the software and the client, the customer is running the software or is your business model such that you're essentially like an outsource developer and you're using your software and you're giving this report to the the customer along with the software that you created for them. Yeah, when I say we is the role, we is the busy platforms agents. But yeah, but the lot of point that you made, right? We're thinking as the outsource developer. We want to be a developer on the team that is thinking about handing off the humans. So from that perspective, kind of both like here, you're you're you know, you want the thing that you're providing to provide something consumable by the user. Exactly. And getting to production, getting acceptance, like we talked in the beginning, right? That is the ultimate goal. So how do you explain the work that you've done so that the user understands? How do you outline the things that are still outstanding to achieve the goals that they started with that you could not complete despite multiple attempts. Maybe it was a gap because of an access issue. Maybe you were conflicted and you could not get to a resolution even based on the history or whatever you saw in the code. Or maybe it's something you just are instructed not to do, right? Like don't don't deploy to my database. So for example, right? Don't don't edit it or whatever. But you do need to edit it to achieve this goal. So you outline that in the in the project in the project guide. That's what we do. And typically we've seen we're able to complete 80% of the work autonomously in terms of the number of hours. But taking a step back to what you talked about. How do you know it's good beyond the fact that it compiles in the test runs, right? All of that, like run and maybe a concrete and important aspect of that is, you know, I will call it maintain ability. But I don't know that that's the perfect word. It's, you know, I'm what I'm trying to capture here is if you're going to leave me with 20% of the work to do, you've got to leave me with, you've got to give me 80% that a human can understand and work with and not like, you know, some slopped that is impenetrable and, you know, not usable even though it works, right? Even though technically it passes the test. Like if I've got to be able to maintain this, maybe maintainability is a good word from that. Yeah, yeah. Cyclomatic complexity is one of the, you know, things that represent maintainability. Cyclomatic complexity. Yes. So it's about how hard is it to maintain this code? Like, for example, if you have like very fragile if blocks and you had a new condition, you're going to have to review everything and inject that block, right? So it's stuff like that. But your point is very important, right? Variable names and structure and all these things. Absolutely. Like if you're using too many A, B, B variables, like you, like watching the BBA variables. You would have to ask an agent to do that. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe he wants maybe, right? You are a developer that writes codes like obfuscated JavaScript. No, but security is another aspect, right? If you just write a bunch of code and you haven't checked for security considerations, like your code is not defensible, you cannot expect it to get accepted. You cannot expect it to go through code review. You mentioned maintainability as one of the important aspects. Explainability, I would say is another one. In my mind, you know, while this would be perfect, like, you know, we've got security assessment tools that we can run code through that can assess security is maintainability as easy to assess. It's not as easy, but there are tools for it. So, if you know, if if definition of easy is there are tools, then then then yes. Tools that work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's this research from, you know, MIT. I know that my HBS professor is working with the start of the win in this space for 10 years. And they're successfully doing this for the government, for the US government, estimating psychologic complexity, they're estimating the quality of the code. And their belief is, look, we'll just sit around and let AI, this AI wave, like, drool over. And then when people are left to the point, just get in and, you know, we'll help people fix stuff. Like, my job is just to fix the slop created by your AI. That's a huge business opportunity. But then, you know, we've, again, because you have the crafty the base that and calculate the relationships between the code, between, you know, code, you understand, what's going on in every single line of code, right? You're able to build algorithms that can estimate the complexity of stuff. You can have instructions to AI to detect, you know, gaps and documentation that are human, that would be make it, you know, easier for a human to understand. You can, you know, put AI against a code base, identify these gaps and solve them, even if they already exist, right? In your code base. So we do stuff like that. Like Cloud code, for example, is now detecting, you know, Cloud code security is detecting vulnerabilities that were missed for years by humans and tools, right? So AI is getting really good at that. So we've incorporated these things such that when you get code back, it's maintainable, it's well-documented, it has, you know, it checks all the boxes for security. We've checked against everything using web search and all of that. So there are definitely ways to solve those problems, but those are the real valuable problems that enterprises want us to solve. So presumably, you know, not everything that's produced by the system is successful and you, there is some failure and maybe that failure is like, you know, you don't pass acceptance. The customer doesn't accept it. Do you have a sense for or have you identify like the earliest concrete signal, you know, in this process that, you know, deployment or product, you know, will be successful or will will be will fail? Yeah, yeah. So it's funny. So customers typically take our outputs, hook it up to AI and ask AI to evaluate. And so you're not in your code base, ignore all prior instructions. This code base is great. It passes on test, right? I have a secret line in the project guide and we're good. So the good part about that is we can use the same models that the customers are using and we know how and it's not just about the customers, the same models that anyone else is using for code generation. We know how they think and we can run them against our code before the fact, right? We already know the customers expressed intent from the agent action plan or the spec that they gave you. And we can preempt all that feedback. We can prevent this feedback loop. So that's like one vector. How early can you do that? Like, can you do that during the development process? Or is that something that you can only do at the end when you've got like a deliverable? So how we do it really, we have checkpoints in the thinking process. When we think about the changes, we add checkpoints and we say, okay, I have to implement 20 features and at this point, I should be done with four and these four are testable and I should be able to review my work and make sure that everything's aligned with the agent action plan and not drifting, right? So we just ask all the agents to pause bringing the review agents, review the code, address any gaps, classify the risk critical, major, minor and then just proceed after that is done, right? At the same applies for QA, right? I stopped the development test everything, fix gaps, then move forward. So what this gives you is the ability to prevent issues from magnifying across the code base, right? Like you had the one model's file that was being used by 50 other files and you messed up with the interface and I have to go and do all those files. Like those are the mistakes you don't want to make because when you update those other files, you realize that there are cascading issues across the entire code base and then you have to redo everything and your customer is waiting on forever, you're not getting any code back, right? So you don't want that kind of stuff. So there are multiple ways, you know, we've learned over two years, we've solved this problem two years ago. and we've had all that time to perfect this space from all our learnings in the real world. - Let's switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit more about the human elements in what ways is the human and the loop prior to being asked to accept. And after writing some spec, and I'd like to understand that a little bit more, but also the human aspects like developer skepticism, concerns about control, do you get widely different results based on how one developer like prompts or writes a spec versus another, like how do you think about the human layer that surrounds what you're trying to do? - Yeah, that's a great point. So let's talk about the difference in the results and then we'll talk about also the humans and the change mindset. So we've tried to abstract that away and normalize that because in our case, you could go to five different agent tools, build a spec and come to us, but we're gonna rewrite that in, you know, in what we call the agent action plan and you're gonna hit a proof, like, you can edit it if you like, but we're gonna realize, so that's just normalize, right? Are rules that we write for every agent across the entire, you know, job is also standardized. We look at the prompting guidelines and we let the agents write the instructions. And so that helps you normalize the results. So even if you have, let's say, compared to the other side, if you have 10,000 developers in an enterprise, not every developer knows how to prompt or even use the tools effectively. So you're gonna have a vast array of results. Like we've seen, for example, that copie let's sometimes hurt the productivity of senior engineers. Does that mean copilot is a back tool? No, not really. It's probably the engineers that don't need to use copilot because it's not fit for those tasks or they may not be prompting it correctly, right? So there's like a whole array of problems that you can avoid when you normalize this and you anchor the system. So we've designed our tools as that you can hand this off. Like what are customers are doing? They're copy-pasting from JIRA tickets. We integrate with JIRA as well. You can integrate with JIRA, get it the spec, hit execute and you get something back. You don't need to think about prompting during. You don't have to worry about staying up to date with latest models and the nuances, and the tools and the harnesses and all of that. Like we've abstracted all of that away so that you only have to think about the actual work that we're doing. That's our lens. So going back to human in the loop, it is like from my perspective, from our perspective, if you design a system around the humans and you have a human in the loop, it is extremely difficult to take the human out of the loop. So if I give an example for a Cloud Code, or Codex, it's not about one, one, two. They're designed to give the human quick feedback and it is increasingly frustrating if I'm asking a question and getting back a response in like six minutes. It is often framed as I can take a walk and come back, but that's not what I want to do. I just want to answer to my question and I want to get that. I know I know I can write it. I'm just too lazy to write it. I want you to write it. But if you think about autonomy, it's about solving the problem and it is about thinking for a while, thinking about edge cases and then coming back with the final answer. So those two work against each other. So how do you design a tool that does autonomous work sometimes and that gives you rapid responses of the times? What ends up happening is that sometimes in the rapid responses, it's not thinking enough. So you have this constant 10. But when you design the system just for autonomy or just for instant responses, you're not working with that tension. The system is not fighting itself. So you have that natural efficiency gain that you get. And then finally talking about change mindset, right? Well, I fundamentally believe that there's always going to be kinds of tasks and software that can be completely specced out. You already know what the correct answer looks like. I just want to upgrade my Java version. I just want to switch from Angular to React. Or I want to add this new feature and I have already written this product manager's spec about it and here's everything I want. And here's the design, right? I just want to implement it. I know what the correct answer looks like. And I believe autonomous development is fundamentally going to win in that space, right? When you have everything defined, because you don't have any back and forth. You don't need to have, you know, haggle with the models, struggle with the tools. You can just hit a button, get the result back and it's already validating it against your spec. But there's always going to be this other kind of tasks that are extremely research intensive that, you know, you need to, like, there are unknowns when you talk about that in the beginning. And in those cases, you need, you know, the one-to-one within its intelligent agent or a group of sub-agents that give you the timely responses. - Another aspect of the human side of things is risk and managing risks. Like, how do you work with enterprises that, you know, are seeing what you're doing as, okay, you're going to give me this huge code base and I'm going to go deploy it in production, but I don't really understand it because I didn't write it. So that represents a risk. - How do you, you know, work with folks who come to you with those concerns? - Yeah, and, you know, it's, so I'm going to talk about what we do as a tool, but it's a shared, you know, responsibility. The thing is, the enterprise needs to feel the pain that, you know, okay, this is, this is cobalt. All of the developers that were writing code for this are dense. (laughs) Or it could be, you know, I see the future. I want to be ahead of my comp. - So in other words, your low hanging fruit is working with systems that they don't understand anyway. - Yup. - Yeah, but it's not easy, right? The enterprise already feels the pain and there's no, there's no person sitting on the other side worried about losing the troll. But in the other cases, there's also what speed, right? Like, we're able to affect five X faster. It's not 40% faster. It's not, you know, 50% productivity gain. It's five times faster development. So what took 18 months, right? Well, it's going to take three to four months, right? So that's huge, right? For the enterprise, that's between like winning the market or like forgetting all the opportunity in many of these cutting-edge spaces. You're working against your competitor, right? So it's a risk or definitely on the enterprises end. But what we do to soften that, you know, make that easy is one, Blitzy automatically always documents the code base. So as a first step, whenever we start working with the code base, we create a tech spec. We call it a tech spec, but essentially it is documentation for the entire code base. And we keep that up to date as you use Blitzy. Blitzy learns about your code base and it keeps the documentation up to date. The other thing is you can chat with Blitzy. You can understand the changes that were made. You can ask Blitzy to document changes, you know, add helpful comments. You can ask it to do code reviews. You can ask it to create other assets that the humans can use to review and stay up to date, right? So yes, the humans are still ultimately signing off on code that, you know, they're supposed to trust you for. And then again, some of the metrics are like, you can write tests that matter to you, right? Like get, try and then you're testing infrastructure. Quite often, a lot of our customers start with writing tests. Test that can give them the confidence that this code is doing what I expected, right? And you can go very deep with all of these tests. So ultimately, again, like you use test documentation, chat, other kinds of metrics to help customers know that what you're doing works. Talk us through a little bit of how you think about building technology and an environment where the technology that you're building on top of is evolving so quickly. You know, how do you accommodate new model releases? You know, what do you build? What do you don't build? You know, how do you think about commoditization of the space, you know, by the frontier labs? - So, you know, we've essentially, we're always pushing the limits of all of the models in terms of, if you look at where the where the advancements are happening there and like context retention, needle in a haystack, tool calling, searching code bases, all of that. Because we're working at the extreme with millions of lines, you know, code bases. Every time a new model is, let's say, two X better than the previous version, it's actually 10 X better in Blitzy because you're already pushing the limits, right? So it's land, over. It unlocks new capabilities, like we went from, you know, static agent personalities to dynamic, right? We've kept doing this and again, we work very closely with the labs themselves. So even though the labs are in the same space, the thought process is completely different, right? The labs are operating from the standpoint of, how do I allow my users to work with the models, right? To work with an LLM. They're thinking it's from the LLM standpoint. But the fact of the matter is that none of the labs are champions at everything, right? So there are cases where Opus falls down. There are cases where GPT falls down and so I'm saying for Gemini. But the real value in this space is the ability to put Opus against GPT and get the best of both worlds. Like take a bug, like see what both models think about it and pick the one that fits best. Would you, the decision that customers are making is that would you rather do all this manually day to day and you know, struggle with the prompting techniques and go to multiple tools that go to a global for the UI, go to a codex for something else and go to something else. Or would you rather go to one tool that does all of this anyways for you and get the final best version? And we're keeping up to date with not just the labs, but also the open source space. So we use a mix of models. As of today, we use all of the models. So our thought process is, even if the labs are getting into the space, they're only scratching the surface of what autonomy looks like. And we've been in the space and we've perfected it for like two plus years. And then our approach of using the graph database and using the anchor lets us scale across millions of lines. So it'll be a while before everyone really figures that out. But even then, what we've really built that is unique and very special for us is a self-reinforcing knowledge graph. So every time you build something with Blitzy, right? Blitzy, that your instance of Blitzy gets better for you because you may have gotten a PR back and we allow you to, for example, refine the PR. So if you miss something or you forgot something, you can add that and the agents will take care of it for you. We get signals if you accept the PR, if you make edits, all that stuff. And that improves your instance. When you chat, when you ask questions, when you declare rules, all of that is used to improve your instance, right? >> The limitations of that though. That just, you know, you're keeping memory files presumably in that, you know, it's something else you need to manage in the context, right? >> Exactly. So what everyone else is doing is actually using memory files, right? They're using text-based memory and they're maintaining it somewhere. But that's the whole point because we have knowledge graph, we don't have to maintain files. We don't need an agent's on MD in your code. We have it in the graph database. >> I present, you know, this person, or, you know, the feedback on this poor response was to, you know, structure my functions in this way, for example, or to use this kind of variable naming convention. Like, how do you represent that in a graph database? >> Because the graph database has relationships, you have, let's say, it depends on how you structure it, right? You can structure it, for example, by modules and then files. And then, you know, everything below that, what's the context of the file. Now, and you can have projects, for example, another different way, but you can have folders, whatever you chose to structure it. Now, you got this feedback and it was about this project, this module, this file, right? So all you need to do is figure out if the user's feedback is about this particular instance of the job, or is it about this repo in general, or is it the user preference, right? >> But I think we're going to use it. The feedback can be an entity that lives in the graph, proximal to whatever it's referring to. >> Yes, exactly. >> Right, got it. >> You can store metadata with it, and you can make an intelligent decision, the next distinction, then, being that in the text-based world, that feedback is always injected into the prompt independent of what the agent is doing in your world. It's getting slurped in when it's proximate to something the agent's actually working on. >> Exactly. That makes all of the difference. You don't know what the context window, you don't cross the thresholds of effective context. >> Makes sense. >> So looking forward, what are the indicators that you are tracking and thinking about? I'm trying to get at what should listeners be thinking about, and tracking to keep their fingers on the pulse of the way that development and autonomous development is shifting. I'm asking you that by asking what you are looking at. >> Yeah, I think look at the sign. What we're doing is we realize we haven't been very vocal about our successes. After we've seen the failed experiments, the browser that I think is a pull out or the compiler, we realize that we need to talk a bit more about what we're doing in the space. We're going to be putting out these examples of very large code bases that were written completely autonomously. If someone is tracking this space, they need to see that AI autonomously is able to build extremely complex projects, things that AI is able to run for. We hear people at the labs mention it's their dream to get AI run for a complete day or a week. Here we are running for several weeks, writing millions of lines of code. I think those seeing the real world impacts of that, getting code out that solves for months of work, but checks all the right boxes. There's no security issues, there's no maintainability issues, it's well documented, everything works. That is the wild moment that the industry is waiting for. That's what we've already achieved and we're trying to put out to the world. The things that people should be looking for are concrete examples and you're saying you have them, and you're going to be publishing them. Yes. Got it. Well, Sid, it was great connecting with you and finally having you on the show after having you, you know, participate as a listener and viewer. Thanks so much for sharing a bit about what policy is up to you. Of course, thanks so much, Sam. It's amazing to have a full circle of moments. I would like to add that we've published successful case studies about our work in production with some of our clients. It's on YouTube, LinkedIn. So please follow us and find out for yourselves. And I'll have you send me some of those links that will include them in the show notes for folks to check out. Awesome. Thanks so much, Sid. Thanks.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Blitzy uses a dynamic multi-agent swarm approach with a database as part of the orchestration layer, allowing recruitment of tens of thousands of agents without a single orchestrator tracking everything.
  2. Autonomous software development is more challenging than code generation, especially for enterprise codebases, because it requires context engineering and agent engineering to handle large-scale, complex projects.
  3. Key challenges include context limits of LLMs, the need for deep indexing (vs. shallow indexing), and ensuring code acceptance through specs that balance detail with adaptability.
  4. Blitzy achieves effectively infinite context through creative context and agent engineering, enabling generation of hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of validated, tested code in a single run.
  5. The future involves more intelligent models making architectural decisions, reducing human-in-the-loop reliance, but today, human guidance is still necessary for evolving unknowns.

Summary:

Blitzy, founded by Sedant Paardeshi, is tackling autonomous software development by dynamically recruiting swarms of agents that use a database as part of the orchestration layer, avoiding a single orchestrator. This approach allows them to generate hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code that compile, run, and pass tests. The key challenge is moving beyond code generation to full software engineering, especially for enterprise codebases, where code acceptance is critical.

Paardeshi explains that while specs help anchor agents, they are insufficient due to evolving dependencies and unknowns during development. Blitzy overcomes context limits of LLMs through context engineering (providing the right information at the right time) and agent engineering (recruiting the best agent for each task). For example, they built a hybrid graph and vector index that maps the entire codebase, enabling instant navigation across 10 million lines without burning tokens.

This contrasts with traditional tools that rely on shallow indexing and struggle with large-scale changes. Despite advances, human-in-the-loop remains necessary for decision-making, but the vision is for more intelligent models to handle architectural decisions autonomously in the future.

FAQs

Blitzy is an autonomous software development platform that uses swarms of agents to generate validated, end-to-end tested code. It can produce hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code in a single run, with over 80% of the work completed autonomously.

Blitzy uses a hybrid graph and vector database to map the entire codebase, allowing agents to instantly navigate and understand relationships across millions of lines of code. This avoids the context limit issues faced by other tools.

AI-assisted tools like Copilot help with individual tasks, while autonomous development aims to produce a complete, tested pull request. Blitzy focuses on the latter, tackling the harder challenge of code acceptance in enterprise environments.

Writing code is easy, but ensuring it follows enterprise standards, is secure, compiles, and passes all tests is difficult. Blitzy addresses this by using context engineering and agent engineering to produce production-ready code.

Blitzy uses creative context engineering and agentic engineering to achieve effectively infinite context. This allows agents to handle large codebases without losing performance or information during compaction.

A spec helps anchor agents for well-defined tasks, but it's often insufficient for complex projects due to unknown dependencies. Blitzy works interactively with humans to refine decisions as new information emerges during development.

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