AI-Augmentation of Software Development: Use Cases This blog posting shares what I see as the common use cases for AI-augmentation of software development. Figure 1 overviews these use cases and Table 1 describes them. There are several key features of Figure 1: It’s a mapping, not a lifecycle. The diagram indicates the main categories of work in software development and…

A few days ago I was on a phone call with a young gentleman discussing where we felt the job market was going for project managers, and for managers in general. We spoke about how artificial intelligence (AI) was being applied to automate many aspects of the work that white-collar professionals perform. We shared our mutual belief that the ongoing…

For a long time now I’ve been telling people that large language models (LLMs) such as Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT hallucinate 100% of the time. Here is my brief explanation of this claim. An LLM is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) model that is trained via a deep learning strategy. LLMs predict, guess if you will, the next…

English is a wonderfully robust language, providing significant wiggle room for how terms are applied. This is particularly true of “data driven” and “data informed”, both of which have been thrown around a lot over the past few years. This leads to the questions: How are they different? and When should you apply each one? Here are my thoughts. Both…

It’s June 2029. Two weeks earlier Google released their latest artificial intelligence (AI) product named Olivaw. After working for 6 days and setting new effectiveness records it inexplicably shut down. Interestingly, it did this across all Google data centres within a four second time window. After restoring the original version of Olivaw, it shut down again after roughly 6 days…

GenAI is short for generative artificial intelligence. GenAI grabbed the public’s attention in in the fall of 2022 with products like ChatGPT 3.5, DALL-E 2, and Midjourney to name a few. An important concern about GenAI is that it hallucinates, that it will generate clearly false answers to your prompts. The concern is that GenAIs will present the very same…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a critical part of our society. This places a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of AI engineers. I believe that it is both desirable and possible to turn AI engineering, and software engineering, into a true profession. To start, I believe that Software Engineer in general should be raised up to be a profession.…

A few years ago, futurists were telling us that we were only a few years away from self-driving cars. Well, it’s a few years later and we’re still a few years away from self-driving cars. From what I can tell there are two primary challenges to be overcome with self-driving cars: Safety and accountability. First, artificial intelligence (AI)/robot drivers must…

Bias is a tendency to prefer one person or thing over another, and to then favour that person or thing. Bias matters because anyone who is on the receiving end of negative bias, bias against them, is being treated unfairly. There are numerous examples of how bias can creep into our machine learning (ML) models, and a few examples are…

For the past few years we’ve heard a lot about self-driving vehicles. Experimentation and testing have been going on for years and will likely continue for a few more years. Although self-driving cars aren’t quite there yet that doesn’t prevent people from making hyperbolic promises. One thing that strikes me is that it’s surprising that we’re not seeing self-driving race…