Automating Software Engineering: Genie Tops SWE-Bench, w/ Alistair Pullen, from Latent.Space podcast
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What inspired Alistair Pullen to create Genie and pursue AI‑driven software engineering?
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan LeBenz, joined by my co-host Eric Tornberg. Hello and welcome back to the cognitive revolution. Today I'm excited to share a special crossover episode from the Latent Space Podcast, co-hosted by Swix and Alessio. For any that don't already know, Latent Space is the number one podcast for practical insights for AI engineers. And while longtime listeners may remember that the Cognitive Revolution was voted number three in the same poll, and I can at times be a bit competitive about these things, in this case I have to agree with the wisdom of the crowd.
The Late in Space Podcast is a regular must-listen for me, and I am grateful to Swix for allowing me to share this episode here. I wanted to cross post Swix and Alessio's conversation with Alistair Pullen of Cosign, Makers of Genie, in particular because it serves as such an excellent complement to my recent episode on AI automation. In that episode, I covered the core best practices needed to automate routine business processes. Which by the way are pretty much exactly the same as you'd use to evolve a software application from DIY to done for you by AI. And this conversation really demonstrates just how far that paradigm can be pushed. Alistair and his team are implementing almost exactly what I outlined.
They are very thoughtfully breaking complex work into smaller AI manageable parts. Curating gold standard examples, using synthetic data generation to fill in critical reasoning chains, and fine tuning intensively to achieve the desired AI behavior. They just happen to be doing it with an unusually high level of ambition, a significant budget for data curation, creation, and fine tuning, and one major additional step of weaving all of the individual optimized workflows together into an AI coding agent. The key takeaway here is clear. If COSIN can achieve a new state of the art on the popular software engineering benchmark Sweebench with this approach, there is no reason to doubt that you can apply these techniques in your own business if you buckle down and do the work.
With that in mind, as I recently mentioned, I'm exploring working with a few companies as an AI automation advisor. I've recently started one project helping a company evolve their application from DIY to Done For You by AI, and I have bandwidth for maybe one or two more projects right now. So if you're interested, please reach out and we'll see if it makes sense to work together. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we appreciate it when folks take a moment to share it with friends, and we always invite your feedback and suggestions either via our website, cognitive revolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. And I really do encourage you to subscribe to the Latin Space Podcast if you haven't already.
Another recent episode with Michelle Pokrass of OpenAI, which includes a deep dive on the structured outputs API and other underappreciated features of OpenAI's APIs, was particularly valuable for me. I've been using some of the techniques that they discussed in just the last two weeks since that episode aired. And I have no doubt that Leighton Space will once again provide some of the best and most comprehensive coverage of this week's OpenAI dev day, which will again help me raise my game. Now, I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the cutting edge of AI automation with Alistair Pullen of Cosign from the Latent Space Podcast.
Hey everyone, welcome to the Laden Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO in residents at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Wix, founder of Small AI.
Hey, and today we're back in the studio in person uh after about three to four months in Visa Jail and travels and all other fun stuff that we talked about in the previous episode.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Alistair Pullen to create Genie and pursue AI‑driven software engineering?
0:00–8:33
2
How did the team build the initial code‑retrieval tool and overcome early technical hurdles?
8:33–15:13
3
What methods were used for fine‑tuning, synthetic data generation, and self‑play training?
15:13–23:49
4
How does Genie perform code search, planning, and reasoning compared to a human developer?
23:49–32:24
5
What were the results on the SWE‑bench benchmark and why are they considered state‑of‑the‑art?
32:24–40:04
6
How does Genie handle customer data, privacy concerns, and integration with private workflows?
40:04–49:04
7
What future improvements, roadmap, and scaling plans does the team have for Genie?
49:04–56:36
8
What practical advice does Alistair give to engineers building their own AI coding agents?
56:36–1:05:10
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from "The Cognitive Revolution"
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