Simon Howe

Simon Howe

Software Engineer

A Recipe for a Better AI-based Code Generator

A Recipe for a Better AI-based Code Generator

When asked about his research process, Anthony Bourdain would describe how he’d blend his formal culinary training with deep dives into local food culture - from market stalls to family recipes. Modern AI code generation follows a similar path: it can’t just rely on what it knows - it must tap into continuously evolving, domain-specific knowledge bases. Just as Bourdain would combine his classical French training with techniques learned from local kitchens, AI code generators blend their built-in knowledge with retrieved code snippets and type definitions to generate code that accurately represents the user’s intent.

Read more →

AI Engineering Lessons from Building Pulumi Copilot

AI Engineering Lessons from Building Pulumi Copilot

Building AI-powered developer tools comes with unique challenges, and now that we’ve launched our REST API, we want to share some lessons we’ve learned building Pulumi Copilot, an AI assistant for cloud infrastructure.

One of the big challenges was determining what ‘working’ really meant. So when a message landed in our feedback channel after months of rigorous testing - ‘Your tool doesn’t know anything!’ - it caused some mild panic. We’d just made some changes, so we braced for the worst. But our evals were still looking strong, so what was going on?

Read more →