To elaborate on the other answers about alphaevolve. the LLM portion is only a component of alphaevolve, the LLM is the generator of random mutations in the evolutionary process. The LLM promoters like to emphasize the involvement of LLMs, but separate from the evolutionary algorithm guiding the process through repeated generations, LLM is as likely to write good code as a dose of radiation is likely to spontaneously mutate you to be able to breathe underwater.

And the evolutionary aspect requires a lot of compute, they don’t specify in their whitepaper how big their population is or the number of generations, but it might be hundreds or thousands of attempted solutions repeated for dozens or hundreds of generations, so that means you are running the LLM for thousands or tens of thousands of attempted solutions and testing that code against the evaluation function everytime to generate one piece of optimized code. This isn’t an approach that is remotely affordable or even feasible for software development, even if you reworked your entire software development process to something like test driven development on steroids in order to try to write enough tests to use them in the evaluation function (and you would probably get stuck on this step, because it outright isn’t possible for most practical real world software).

Alphaevolve’s successes are all very specific very well defined and constrained problems, finding specific algorithms as opposed to general software development