On Board with AI
My initial thoughts
I was talking to my mom about AI. I felt compelled to convey my thoughts regarding AIās efficiencies and shortcomings to her. I had just obtained the Microsoft AI Engineer Certificate and my ego was in need of some check.
My opinion was that I thought AI was just hype, it wasnāt all the applicably useful - executives all just collectively agreed it was the future.
I felt that they were pushing vaporware in order to claim market share. That way if AI suddenly did something useful they would be poised to rake in the dough.
To be clear I thought AI was amazing, particularly LLMs. I thought it was so cool to actually hold a real conversation with a bot.
However I couldnāt see much utility past that sense of wonder.
It was a party trick.
Impressive, just not something anyone should pay to see.
The Ethics Question
Worse yet, LLMsā genesis is concerning.
The sheer amount of power and energy it took to train the models brings up ethical concerns, not to say the people who were exploited in passing in training data.
The books ruined. The copy written work taken, it may not be illegal Iām sad to find out but my heart goes out to the authors who did not consent for their words to be used in a way outside of their intention.
I was skeptical about so many things regarding AI.
Fast Forward a Year
AI still is mentioned in every engineering podcast, talk, presentation, YouTube video, and blog post.
I felt I was going to pull my hair out if I heard another one more dev mention it.
But I have to concede that models have come incredibly far and new revolutionary tools hit the internet seemingly every week.
At work Iām now using cursor for projects and I doubt I could go back. Iām at least 25% faster of a dev than I was before it.
Cursor wrote functions I knew I wanted to write but would have had to think for minutes on how to create.
It implemented application-level architecture across multiple files effortlessly, sometimes even one-shotting my half-baked prompts.
I canāt imagine going without Cursor at this point.
I even felt the need to use the IDE for personal projects.
I also now use Warp which to a lesser degree has helped boost my productivity but it still has come in clutch on numerous occasions.
Building an Agent
This week I had some free time and decided to create a Slack app that uses LangGraph to call OpenAI models and give it tools to use for various dev-related tasks, to make an agent.
There was a learning curve to LangChainās framework, and another on how to understand models vs how I understood their behavior last year.
A lot is still unknown about the best way to build agents, prompts, and how we engage with models. But as time goes on Iām seeing the writing on the wall. AI is no longer a party trick, itās an essential part of my dev tooling.
The Noise in the Space
Thereās no shortage of content on how to learn more about AI, tooling, and agent creation.
A lot of the content contradicts itself.
It feels kinda funny to listen to one podcast say āagents have too many guardrails, just give them plenty of tokens and let it ripā and then listen to another and hear āagents need guardrails to be effectiveā.
A Conversation with My Mom
Going back to me punishing my mother telling her everything I thought about AI.
She brought up an anecdote about personal computers when she was growing up and how her mother refused to adopt them at her job.
Iām sure itās all everyone talked about. I wonder if it was as annoying to devs then as the AI hype cycle is to me now.
She then went on to say that there were plenty of people who stated - āno computer is going to replace this system I have nowā.
āIf I need something I go to a file cabinet and retrieve it. I donāt need to worry about memory, pulling up the correct program, then printing it. Itās already printed!ā
A lot of people probably went the rest of their careers not using PCs.
They were probably able to retire or find a place in their orgs where they didnāt need a PC.
But a lot of people also adopted early.
They had the advantage of getting a head start learning the new way of doing business. They could become power users, boost productivity, and even have career opportunities.
My Realization
Hearing that anecdote resonated with me. History may not repeat itself but it rhymes. In such a short time peoples work changed dramatically. Maybe even more so when things were digitized.
AI at this point isnāt going to replace anyone, but it is a new tool that changes the way we do our work.
AI moves faster than we can.
There are a lot of difficulties it poses but this is the new normal so we may as well embrace our new workflow because thereās no putting it back in the bottle.
I see it now. Iām on board.