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World Congress 2026 Europe • Jul 9, 2026 • Session details

Rules, Heuristics, or LLMs? Lessons from Solving the Same Problem Twice

Artur Naumenko

One engineering team built a drunk text generator twice. They pitted traditional heuristics against a fine-tuned LLM. Discover which approach truly minimizes hidden technical debt.

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#1 about 1 min

Solving the same problem twice with code and LLMs

Overengineering a project on purpose reveals the differences between rule-based logic and fine-tuned language models.

#2 about 5 min

Identifying the grey zone between heuristics and language models

Problems with subjective outcomes or infinite edge cases require choosing between probabilistic heuristics and data-driven models.

#3 about 2 min

Corrupting text as a test case for subjective metrics

Generating realistic typos provides a perfect test case because measuring text corruption relies purely on subjective observation.

#4 about 2 min

Using rule-based heuristics to simulate realistic typing errors

Combining Markov chains and edit distances creates a configurable but highly complex programmatic engine for text corruption.

#5 about 2 min

Training a language model with synthetically generated text pairs

Fine-tuning a lightweight model with LoRA requires thousands of examples generated by the initial heuristic engine.

#6 about 2 min

Evaluating output quality between algorithmic tuning and machine learning

While both methods produce believable results, rule-based systems often output extreme noise compared to the natural averaging of models.

#7 about 5 min

Balancing execution costs and maintenance flexibility in production systems

Algorithmic approaches offer cheap execution and deep debuggability while machine learning systems demand higher computational resources but handle complexity automatically.

#8 about 2 min

Four questions for deciding between code and language models

Analyzing output metrics, debugging requirements, input space width, and bounds definition determines the appropriate technical solution.

#9 about 2 min

Why handbuilt systems often require more effort than models

Hand-tuning complex probabilistic systems frequently proves more difficult than allowing a machine learning model to learn the desired behavior.

#10 about 3 min

Hardware requirements and tuning heuristics with machine learning models

Running lightweight models relies on consumer hardware while attempting to tune algorithmic parameters automatically introduces significant system fragility.

Matching moments

3:26 min

Introducing LLMs as judges for automated testing

Sebastian Messingfeld Sebastian Messingfeld · WWC Europe 2026

6:28 min

Natural language programming and prompt engineering

46 sec

Using LLMs to reverse engineer undocumented legacy code

Michele Zuccala Michele Zuccala +4 · WWC Europe 2026

1:53 min

Deciding if large language models are actually necessary

Mete Atamel Mete Atamel · WWC 2024

1:59 min

Evaluating statistical models and the bitter lesson

Kamen Petroff Kamen Petroff · WWC Europe 2026

3:01 min

Balancing artificial intelligence tools with foundational software engineering skills

Tim Ruscica · Coffee With Developers

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