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Patrick Collins

Patrick Collins

Co-founder and CEO of Dam Secure, an AI security startup that puts guardrails on AI-generated code; former Chief Product and Technology Officer at Zip and Secure Code Warrior.

Nov 5, 2026

10:15
So it is a double-edged sword, but I think you've got safe harbor in these kind of bigger scale providers for sure.
10:23
One way to process what Simon's saying is vanilla and simple is best.
10:27
Think about it this way.
10:28
The LLMs are trained on all the stuff that's on the open internet, and the more common and popular that stuff is, the more likely you are to get it right.
10:37
And so vanilla is good right now.
10:39
Vanilla TypeScript.
10:41
Why go with obscure language choices that have poor training data for the LLMs and probably have less... just overall less training data when you can go simple and vanilla there was there was once a period of time where cool tech modern tech was the right way to go and and it was normally through the lens of sometimes you know like principles like dry and you know keeping the code simpler and that doesn't matter anymore it doesn't matter if the code's verbose it doesn't matter if it if it takes more lines of code and is harder to read.

20 MINS LATER

31:20
And so I feel like most implementations are lights on and people are getting involved, either when the agent just has too much ambiguity and it needs to ask questions or follow up questions to, you know, flesh out the spec a little bit more, implementation didn't go as planned and so on.
25:09
Can you, can you tell us what that means? In firstly, what does open weight mean? And secondly, how, how is that affecting the world of cybersecurity?
25:18
Sure.
25:19
The frontier models that we got initially from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, they're closed models.
25:26
You call them directly into their service.
25:28
You can't, um, look at how that, those models work.
25:33
And the Chinese models, by comparison, are open weight models.
25:38
That means you can download them, you can run them locally on your computer, we can run them with sovereign, in sovereign locations.
26:54
So it sounds like the Chinese models have, have changed everything in a way.
LovethHOST
33:08
How did you land on Damsecure? What was the problem? Why was that the problem you thought was worth interrogating and solving?
33:15
I think as I mentioned, I'd been, I knew that it was going to be time for me to start my own business again soon.
33:20
So it was like a phase of my life I was coming back into.
33:23
I really enjoy being chief product officer at larger companies, but there's something about doing it for yourself.
33:29
And as a builder, it's a pretty easy transition to go from being a product executive to building your own business.
33:35
It's, it's actually not as hard as it sounds because it's just product executive for another company to being a product executive at your own company.
33:44
Um, and so it was kind of right time for my life.
LovethHOST
36:40
No.
10:46
Where do you guys want to kind of break down all the research or like, is there an underlying theme that you want to set the tone for? Well,
10:55
I mean, maybe we should just start talking about what, what this research is and what we found.
11:01
So literally over the last week, there's been five different model drops.
11:10
So we've had Gemini 3.8 flash, sorry, uh, Gemini 3.8 flash that Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, which is AGI, by the way.
11:20
It's like, okay.
11:21
Yeah.
11:25
6 Astra and then DeepSeek V4.1.

47 MINS LATER

58:40
So it's really nice to see that kind of illustrated with the data.

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