It's all Ball Bearings (AI) These Days

I saw recently that Google and Amazon announced how much AI they use to generate code, Google in percent, and Amazon in hours saved. There has been a lot of hype that it is all AI these days. Over the summer, I played around with different AIs to get my head in this space to see how much is hype.

I built a few Python apps in Google Colab to detect license plates in a video stream from my bike rides. Colab uses Codey and Gemini, and they did an excellent job of getting me started as someone who didn't know Python or the libraries available. I am a trial-and-error learner who tries something and, when it doesn't work, refers back to references to figure out why. At one point, I had a working app and asked how I could change the implementation to be multi-threaded, which it did. It didn't work, but that resulted from Colab and not the code generated.

In my new job, I make a point to use ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and/or Claude a few times a week. Last week, I asked it to create two apps for me; a random people picker as a spinning wheel and an out-of-office (OOO) helper. The spinner took me about 15 minutes to get right, so I repeatedly asked Copilot to modify the implementation to get it the way I wanted. In the end, it was close, and I made minor changes to the CSS. The exciting thing about this approach was that I iterated with Copilot to turn the implementation instead of finding completed implementation(s) and Frankensteining them together.

Where it has yet to work well for me at work is melding technology with the specifics of my organization. For instance, what does an executive dashboard look like for our ecosystem? Or what is the best way to configure the on-call paging system across our teams? Sure, I asked if there were any best practices or pitfalls others have run into, and the answers were very generic, which is what I would expect.

My experience and intuition suggest that we can benefit from leveraging AI. As I build the 2025 roadmap, I am encouraging the team to consider how AI or AI-powered products can help us achieve more and faster.