13 hours ago
The Era of “I think this is the problem.”
2 days ago
Counting Token Shock
3 days ago
Up at 5 am for Saturday Morning Cartoons
4 days ago
I Can do That!
5 days ago
This Looks Like a Good Problem to Solve
6 days ago
No One Person is the Meeting
7 days ago
Worth the Travel?
1 week ago
Training an LLM for a Marathon
1 week ago
Your First Meeting
1 week ago
One thing AI will never be able to do
13 hours ago
We are exiting the era of someone knowing the answer and entering the era where everyone around the room can say – “I think it’s this”. During a call, everyone can bring up their AI tool du jour, copy and paste an error message in, and come back with a “I think it is this”. It’s not the answer; there is no analysis, there is no surety in what we are trying to solve. Having more information is great, but if it’s not directed to the solution at hand, it’s just more noise. Whereas we used to have people who …
Counting Token Shock
Greg Thomas
Counting Lines of Code became… Counting Number of Unit Tests Generated became… Generating the number of class files became… Ensuring we had everything commented, which became… An unlimited number of TODOs in our code. And now we are counting Tokens of usage and surprise, surprise – we are gamifying and overusing them so that our metrics look inflated. I AM SHOCKED!!!! Yes, your team should be using AI. But if you’re measuring your team by their token consumption, it’s a lazy, easy metric. Instead, why not look at; As with development metrics of the past, the first metric identified is …
3 days ago
Up at 5 am for Saturday Morning Cartoons
Greg Thomas
If you can recreate that magic, where kids would wake up in the morning, with or without cereal, and watch your show for 2 – 3 hours, to catch the best cartoons, the ones they loved the most, then you have something. If you can recreate the need for someone to show up, you’ve built something. If they rush into the kitchen to make something while trying not to miss the previews, then you have something. Take it, build up on it, don’t stop making it better. But that’s the level of magic you’re trying to create – that’s the …
1 week ago
One thing AI will never be able to do
Spend 3 hours trying to force your way through a problem because you’re a developer and you think you can code anything. So you spend 3 hours going up against the wall, even using Claude to help you with what you are doing wrong. And then you finally read the KB article associated with the error and realize you just wasted 3 hours. But wow… what a day of trying to make the impossible work. Want more? Check out my book Code Your Way Up – available as an eBook or Paperback on Amazon (CAN and US). I’m also the …
2 weeks ago
How about Fixing Traffic?
If there is a problem that everyone in the world has experienced at some point in their lives, it is traffic. Whether in a car or stuck behind someone on a sidewalk, traffic is where we can spend a long time thinking about life. Because what else are you going to do? There really isn’t much. And yet, we have done nothing to solve the traffic problem. And when I say solve, I don’t mean “alleviate”, “minimize”, or “reduce”, I mean solve the problem of traffic. Get me from Point A to Point B without any issues whatsoever, without an …
2 weeks ago
I got Skillzzzz
I’ve been playing around with Skills on Claude quite a bit lately – automating common tasks that I’d agonize over that cover all the bases and give me the output to move forward with. Like anything, I’ve discovered there is a whole “Skills” marketplace, which brought me back to last year when people were buying and selling prompts on prompt exchanges. I think skills are a great workflow tool. I like being able to tailor and focus them on the work that I do specifically – essentially becoming an extension of my work and less about the prompt I put …