My AI Transformation

An IT Veteran's Journey

I've have lived through several technology epochs in my career: pre-Internet (coding with floppy disks and tapes), Web 1.0, and Web 2.0 (cloud and mobile). With each transition, I've found hands-on learning essential to properly understand the capabilities and implications of emerging technologies. Generative AI represents something different - a fundamental shift in how we design, build, govern, and manage systems and its happening faster than we can possibly understand.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed
- William Gibson

There's significant hype around AI, so my approach is to "plan for the worst, hope for the best" by developing a deep understanding of these systems and to start working through the "What if?" questions that will help inform an Enterprises AI Transformation.

How productive could our engineering team be?
Do I need to change my talent pool and sourcing strategy?
Are there problems that we could solve that have been just too expensive before?
How will we manage security?
Do we need to retrain our development teams, or are these new ways of working something that can be easily picked up?
How do we control spend?
Can we fine tune LLMs to be more impactful for our use cases?

And many more!!!

There are two learning trajectories that I am currently focused on. The first one involves using AIs to code, while the second one revolves around building apps that incorporate AI (GenAI) as part of the product. Both of these trajectories signify a fundamental shift from the knowledge I have accumulated over the past two decades building apps, systems, and solutions for my clients. Despite the challenges, it is thrilling to contemplate the possibility of developing something within weeks that would have previously taken me years to accomplish.

I have an emerging set of hypothesis/predictions as to how these solutions will evolve. My first is that whilst the big players are building these Large Language models to solve all problems, hence their drive to build AGI. My world will be about building micro bots to solve specific targeted problems, which I think is going to be the evolution of application development.

This digital garden/blog serves as a platform to capture my thoughts, notes and document my experiments and learning as I explore the impact of these new technologies on software development and application design.

Some thoughts are mature and happy to stand the test of time, others are seedlings that I am growing and will mature.

Where to start?

My macro thoughts, are probably a good place to start if you are none technical and wondering why we are here and what it all means

Micro ReadMe is what should be my twitter consciousness if I had the courage to post there.

I am .. _ReadMe is a subcategory of micro apps that I am building to test and validate my learnings.

AI _ReadMe is an evolving compendium of thoughts and learnings.

Some links of interest.

My Learning/Experiment Backlog Board
Github