Home on Giovanni Pinna

There Is No "Best" AI Coding Agent — And That's the Whole Point

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We looked at 7,156 pull requests from five AI coding agents on real open-source projects. The agent matters less than you'd think. The kind of work matters far more.

When AI Agents Lie About Their Own Code (Without Meaning To)

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Only 1.7% of AI-authored pull requests have descriptions that don't match their code. Those PRs get accepted 51.7% less often and take 3.5× longer to merge. Trust is the bottleneck nobody is measuring.

Sometimes the Best Feature Engineering Is Throwing Features Away

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Classifying urgent software hotfixes is hard: tiny dataset, brutal class imbalance, expensive LLM features. We let evolution pick which features to keep — and discovered some were actively making things worse.

Sometimes Your AI Agent Burns More Energy Optimizing Code Than the Code Will Ever Save

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AI coding agents that 'optimize' your code can cost more energy than they save — for hundreds of thousands of runs. We tuned the agent itself, and got 37.7% faster runs and better code at the same time.

The Text-to-SQL Field Has a Measurement Problem

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every text-to-SQL benchmark today scores queries as either perfect or wrong. That's a coin flip dressed up as a metric. We built one that actually tells you how close you got.

Making the LLM-Plus-Evolution Pipeline Actually Smart

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last year we showed evolution can fix LLM code. This year we made the evolution itself smarter — better selection, partial credit, fewer cycles — and got improvements in 11 of 12 cases.

Improving LLM-Generated Code via Genetic Improvement: A Summary of Recent Advances

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A comprehensive summary of our research program on applying Genetic Improvement to LLM-generated code, presented at the Italian national AI conference Ital-IA 2025.

GPT-4 Can Make Court Rulings Easier to Read. It Can Also Lie to You About Them, Confidently.

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We asked 75 people to read summaries of Italian Constitutional Court rulings — written by experts, by GPT-4o, by a fine-tuned LLaMA, and the raw judgments themselves. The results say more about LLMs than about courts.

What If We Stopped Asking ChatGPT to Fix Its Own Code?

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Self-correction is the default fix for buggy LLM code, but it has a ceiling. We tried something stranger — evolving the code instead — and it worked across every model we tested.

Influence

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A platform combining marketing and AI to analyze audiences and generate targeted social media content.

Influence: Where Marketing Meets Artificial Intelligence

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A project exploring the intersection of marketing and artificial intelligence, using data analysis to generate targeted social media content.

Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0100

A review of Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize-winning work on how we make decisions and the cognitive biases that influence our thinking.

Book Review: Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0100

A review of Steve Krug's classic guide to web usability and human-computer interaction.

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I'm Giovanni 👋

AI Researcher · ML Engineer · Ph.D.

I'm an AI Researcher and Engineer based in Trieste, Italy, with a Ph.D. in Applied Data Science & Artificial Intelligence. My work sits at the intersection of NLP, Large Language Models, and AI Agents, and Evolutionary Computation — building systems that improve and evaluate AI-generated code.

Get in Touch View My CV

🎯 My Story

My journey in computer science started in high school, where I fell in love with programming and electronics. That curiosity led me to a B.Sc. in Electronic and Computer Engineering (2015–2019) at the University of Trieste, where my first AI courses sparked a passion that shaped everything that followed — continuing with a M.Sc. in Computer Engineering (2019–2022) focused on Data Science and AI. A semester at Montanuniversität Leoben through Erasmus+ pushed me out of my comfort zone: applying AI to energy and logistics taught me how transferable these methods really are.

Activities

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Academic and professional activities

Contact

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Get in touch with Giovanni Pinna

Curriculum Vitae

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Giovanni Pinna

Publications

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Full list of publications