Hello World

Hi there. I’m going to start by saying hello. And I’ll apologize up front, my writing skills are rusty. Maybe they were never that great. But perhaps through exercising them here, they’ll begin to improve.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been immersing myself in the latest AI tools and exploring the possibilities. As a software engineer, the concept of machine learning is not new to me. I have worked with AI systems in the past.

Most of my software development experience has been in application development. I have hacked on web and mobile apps for big enterprises and tiny startups. I’ve even built and published a few apps of my own.

Over the years I have built integrated features with ML models. I have also supported the deployment and monitoring of models from an SRE or DevOps perspective.

I’ve taken several undergraduate and graduate-level courses on machine learning. The most recent involved some robotics and embedded development and culminated in building a self-driving RC car. Fun stuff.

But over the past few years I haven’t kept up with the latest developments in AI. Specifically LLMs. I’ve had my head buried in the sand to an extent. I’d prompt ChatGPT with a coding question here and there, but there was always this lack of trust. And I would scrutinize every response.

I was frightened at how good LLMs have become at writing code. It’s scary because I’ve invested a lot of time over the past 20 years getting code at writing code. What does this democratization do to the value of that?

But looking past my fear, I’m realizing just how awesome this revolution is! Using coding agents, I’m more productive than I’ve ever been. I’m exploring more ideas and iterating faster than ever. And I’m starting to realize the value was never in the writing of the code. The value is in the final product… the thing that the code enables.

What initially attracted me to computers almost 30 years ago wasn’t writing code. The code came later. It was an implementation detail. The thing that got me into programming was the possibilities that programming enabled. To control the machine and make magic.

From that perspective, I’m rethinking everything from first principles and perhaps re-inventing myself a little. And I’m starting this blog to share my journey of embracing this wild technology and exploring what new possibilities are being unearthed. I might even make some magic.