geordee

Technical Credit Score

Ward Cunningham coined the term technical debt to describe the trade-offs between engineering costs and short-term business gains. One takes debt only if it justifies a positive return on investment that exceeds the interest cost over time.

Uncle Bob explains how unrealistic or unreasonable choices lead to technical mess, not technical debt. Technical debts are reasonable decisions — they are made deliberately to support business gains, in the face of project constraints that involve cost and time. When these conditions aren’t met, he calls it technical mess rather than debt.

Often, as time passes and with widespread use, the meaning...

Disruptive Innovation Next

Oftentimes, we think innovation is all about new ideas and methods. Of course, innovate comes from “in” (into) and “novus” (new). By extension, we assume that innovation is about creating better products and services. After all, why should we innovate if we are not making things better?

However, in the real world, innovation can also mean creating new markets or networks that did not exist due to various reasons. This is what Clay Christensen describes in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

Disruptive innovation does not challenge the leaders directly.

Disruptive innovation does not challenge the leaders directly. Instead,...

Fast Tech

Fast food, fast fashion, and now fast tech.

We had recipes, templates, libraries, and automation. And then exploitation.

We had standardisation, sourcing, scaling, and just-in-time. And then gluttony.

We had expertise, designs, craftsmanship, and research. And then hype.

Speed thrills.

AI Instincts

“You are a customer service agent for Acme International” - that’s how the prompt starts. But what’s a customer service agent? Beyond the behaviors encoded in the prompt, what does the foundation model bring to the table? And how different would it be from model to model and version to version?

Last year we created a chatbot which engages with customers through conversations. The AI was inquisitive and would keep the conversation going, almost indefinitely. So, we dumbed it down to a question/answer bot. This year the experience is quite different. The newer version of the foundation model seems to...

Learn to Unlearn

We had implemented an AI solution in 2024. These days we are working on updating the underlying Generative AI models for better functionality and performance. The prompts used in 2024 had a lot of instructions to make AI work the way we wanted to - some transformations, a few guards, and a couple of examples. Soon we realized that the old prompts were not quite effective with the new models - in fact we did not need too many specific instructions with the newer models. It was a moment of unlearning for us, and it was quite recognizable as the...

Age of Agents

“What’s an agent?”, my friend asked. To me it’s quite obvious from the word itself. Agent is an entity which has “agencies” - power or capacity to fulfil an action or a service. And agents act on behalf of someone. Today, we want AI models to be the agents - agents to perform actions on our desktop or through the internet of things.

How does it work? The AI models, acting as agents, need knowledge and tools. The knowledge to answer questions, make decisions, or to learn how to use tools. Tools to do things, make changes, send emails, book...

Ready, Set, AI

These days it’s difficult to talk about technology without mentioning AI. I have been quiet about AI for a while, as the enthusiasm gets built up through newer models, larger capacities, and more attractive demonstrations and use cases.

Yet, I have been using AI tools regularly, getting excited about every new feature and slowly waning off the interest as I start using it for some serious work. It’s a pattern I have observed with code completions, vibe coding, writing assistance, audio summaries, image generation and countless other use cases on the world-wide web today. The problem I faced was often...

AI Front Desk

In 1995, I got my first email id. And we had access to the world wide web. We were browsing the internet on dumb terminals without a mouse, using a browser called Lynx. The Internet was a place where we go to read random stuff and kill time.

One of the first technology transformations I witnessed and experienced was Dotcom in the 2000s. Everyone built websites for just about everything - for business, shops, people, pets - even the toasters were tweeting. By the end of the decade, we had some best practices around building and hosting websites, user interface...

Textbooks for AI

By now all of us are familiar with Generative AI. Type a question into ChatGPT, and we wait for the magical response, often better that we can find or write or even think. Some of us have replaced Google with ChatGPT. If the topic is not current affairs, ChatGPT seems to provide better answers and that too without the ads and clickbait.

World Knowledge

ChatGPT, and other competing models, are pre-trained on vast content from the Internet, which it correlates and creates a semantic understanding of the world. I will refer to this as world knowledge. It is no...

Sorry! I cannot help you with that.

My last article was over a year ago. It was about the rise of Generative AI. A lot of things changed in one year. AI models have become much more capable, and fast. And, the hype took a feverish turn, and now it is subsiding for good.

AI is extremely successful in the consumer space. Friends of mine who are not in the technology industry are putting AI to good use - to write, create, record, summarise. They can live with the inaccuracies and ambiguities of the AI responses. They themselves are human in the loop.

During the past one...