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LLAMA 3.1 70B INSTRUCT
LEIDOS
+20%
increase in developer efficiency+20%
improvement in development velocity-92%
reduction in time lost to context switching and learning+33%
faster engineering and feature implementation*All results are self-reported and not identifiably repeatable. Generally, expected individual results will differ.
CASE STUDY
Helping developers manage high-stakes, high-security codebases
At a glance
Industry
SoftwareUse case
Streamlining legacy codebase management and modernizationGoal
Assist developers with massive codebases and automate mundane coding tasksLlama version
Llama 3.1 70B InstructDeployment
Sourcegraph’s code intelligence platform, AWS LISATHEIR STORY
Making smart smarter
Leidos serves government and commercial customers with smarter, more efficient digital and mission innovations. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Leidos helps solve the toughest challenges in healthcare, national security, transportation and defense.
THEIR GOAL
Automating code discovery, management and generation for massive, legacy codebases
Leidos manages, modernizes and authors software for defense, national security and healthcare clients. They grapple with decades of legacy code and work in extremely secure, air-gapped environments.Modernization is key, but the risk to the critical services means the codebases and proposed changes need to be thoroughly documented, analyzed and understood. The team needed an agentic toolset that could answer questions about codebases, automate code modernization and documentation and help debug.
THEIR SOLUTION
Llama and Sourcegraph power comprehensive codebase insight and code generation
Leidos uses Sourcegraph to manage and modernize legacy codebases. The Sourcegraph platform turns codebases into knowledge bases, which the platform’s AI uses to help developers understand legacy software and generate accurate code.Leidos paired Sourcegraph with Llama 3.1 70B Instruct, creating a powerful solution that helps developers generate unit tests, create code skeletons and document code. The solution can answer complex questions about code details — a huge benefit for developers ramping up on unfamiliar projects.
THEIR APPROACH
Security and cost constraints required an open-source LLM, only Llama proved fully capable
Leidos developers work in highly secure environments running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Logically Isolated Secure Air-gapped (LISA) infrastructure, which rules out API calls to hosted models. Using proprietary models locally was a no-go due to per-token charges. Open-source large language models (LLMs) seemed to be an ideal solution, but tests demonstrated two major flaws: high latency and out-of-date training data.“With other open-source models, we were experiencing significant lag. Our Sourcegraph clients would timeout,” says Jay Davis, Chief National Security Software Architect at Leidos. “One model had no knowledge of Java beyond v15. Once we implemented Llama, timeouts stopped and the model’s code libraries were up to date.”
Sourcegraph uses Llama to create intelligent code knowledge bases and assist developers with code analysis, generation and documentation.
THEIR SUCCESS
Open-source Llama helps Leidos innovate within tight budgets
With Llama and Sourcegraph, Leidos found an open-source technology they could use to bring leading generative AI innovation to customers with fixed budgets who don’t invest in anything that doesn’t advance the mission.Llama-powered innovation has proven to be a valuable asset. Their success in combining Llama and Sourcegraph has given Leidos a competitive edge in federal contracts for advanced software development.
- +20% increase in developer efficiency
- +20% improvement in development velocity
- -92% reduction in time lost to context switching and learning
- +33% faster engineering and feature implementation
“Our customers have constrained budgets. They prioritize resources for mission functionality instead of enabling technologies. Open-source Llama allowed us to pursue generative AI coding assistants with customers who would have otherwise considered it cost prohibitive.”
Jay Davis — Chief National Security Software Architect, Leidos
“Llama provided Leidos with the flexibility, knowledge and power we needed to use generative AI for coding tasks in highly secure environments, enhancing efficiency by increasing capacity for more complex software development.”
Jay Davis — Chief National Security Software Architect, Leidos
“Llama is a great general-purpose foundation model that works well in coding situations and has the size and knowledge to help developers with day-to-day tasks. Llama goes above and beyond other models that have smaller context windows and outdated training data.”
Jay Davis — Chief National Security Software Architect, Leidos
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