Chris Beck

Chief Mischief Officer @bitcrowd

Chris founded bitcrowd in 2010 as a rails company, since 2016, bitcrowd mainly works with elixir projects. Their open source elixir projects include https://github.com/bitcrowd/carbonite and https://github.com/bitcrowd/chromic_pdf.

When ChatGPT had its first coding interview with Chris, he was fascinated to encounter a new form of thinking and coding, reminiscent of his fascination with BASIC on his first computer at the age of 12.

Since then, he has been researching the opportunities, dangers, and influence of AI. bitcrowd, his Elixir consultancy, has built various ML projects since 2021.

Talk:
Why you want RAG in your Dev Setup, and how to do it for Elixir

Aside from the hype around code generation, the potential of information retrieval, especially retrieval augmented generation (RAG), is often overlooked. Here, LLMs are becoming the industry standard for retrieving information from documents. Embedding Models allow the retrieval of information based on imprecise search terms in a way that was not possible with full text indices.

However, the application of RAG techniques on code bases is much less common. This talk sheds some light on the current state of retrieval augmented generation, how easy it is to use, and how it can empower development teams.

We will have a look at the general techniques, what online models are capable of, and what performance can be expected from local setups. We will explore the state of RAG support for Elixir, both as input-codebase, and as processing entity. We will further see what influence the coding style and the ingestion process has on the usefulness of the results.

Key Takeaways:

  • At the end of the talk, the audience will know what benefits retrieval augmented generation (RAG) on code has for their team, and what performance to expect.
  • They would have an idea on how to set up their own open source RAG system, and how to amend it to their needs.
  • They would also be able to understand what uses cases RAG offers and spot it’s usage in the wild.

Target Audience:

  • Developers who are interested in the influence and benefits of AI, specifically Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), on their workflow and how it can enhance collaboration among team members.
  • CTOs, Lead Developers, and Engineering Managers who aim to foster effective information exchange and improve the efficiency of their development teams.
  • People interested in LLM’s, AI, RAG