With AI, what should we be focusing on?
Last week, Nicola, Lachlan, and I attended the Yow! Tech Leaders conference in Melbourne. The event was a delight, offering an opportunity to connect with old and new acquaintances.
Notably, several talks at the conference centered around the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Given its widespread adoption across industries and within companies for both external product development and internal team productivity enhancement, it's understandable that AI was a prominent focus. Thus, we should be asking:
- How useful has AI been during the development phase?
- Are the teams more productive with AI?
- Can we achieve more with less?
- What is the effect on quality?
- What are the long term implications?
- How can we better use AI?
- How do we lead an AI transformation within our companies?
Key takeaways from the conference regarding AI are:
- Flow and productivity can be negatively impacted by substantial waste, regardless of code assistants (Sarah Taraporewalla)
- AI accelerates our existing behaviours and humans default to adding stuff when solving problems, because that feels like progress, and we don’t tend to subtract stuff. But constantly adding stuff creates complexity that we usually don’t need. Focusing on speed without ensuring quality creates systems that degrade over time (Annie Vella)
- Systems are prone to breaking when teams lack skills, intuition, or a clear focus on what makes up quality. The adoption of AI can exacerbate these issues (Annie Vella)
- Al-assisted codebases are getting bigger, faster. Added code increases; churn increases; and moved code goes to 0% (which indicates less refactoring). Good engineering practices still matter (if not more) and can mitigate Generative AI (GenAI) risks (Sarah Taraporewalla)
- Using AI tools results in a 4% boost in productivity, but only 1% of GenAI is committed without significant rework (Rasmus Lystrøm)
- Treat AI as a non-human system user by applying robust architecture, engineering patterns, validations, and guardrails to ensure effective communication and collaboration (Simon Wardan)
In essence, while AI holds the potential to boost productivity, the current benefits are not substantial enough. Moreover, it's essential to adhere to good engineering practices more stringently than ever before to mitigate GenAI risks. There are no free lunches when it comes to implementing AI into your work environment. Uncritical use of AI without good engineering practices results in unsustainable performance: your future self will hate you for the complicated spaghetti code your current (immature) AI is generating en masse. You can shortcut now, but it’s not a long term strategy!
How useful do you find AI at your work? Share your experiences with us.
~ Elle
ps. I've included the infographics I created from the day below here...
What’s been happening?
Helga's board kickstarter program
Last month Elle participated in Helga Svensden's Take on Board Kickstarter Program with another eleven accomplished, incredible, and inspiring women. Helga gently challenged us, and got us into action and applying to board roles.
If your business is looking for an experienced technology professional to put on the board, talk to Elle.
Leading engineering teams workshop
Would you like to improve your leadership? Do you aspire to a management or leadership role? Would you love to scale your leadership and bring your promising ICs and/or team leads up a level in capacity? Are you tired of webinars or courses that are dry and boring?
From leadership styles, team culture, giving and receiving feedback, effective one-on-ones, mentoring, prioritisation, to balancing speed, quality, and technical debt, this workshop will provide you with the essential technical leadership skills that you can apply immediately, and will enable you to lead with empathy and confidence.
With the end of the financial year approaching, we are offering a special early bird rate for our August workshop. This special rate is available until June 30th (for the next 3 days), which is a great opportunity to use your training budget.
Check out: https://blackmill.co/coaching-training/workshops/leading-engineering-teams
Leadership executive coaching
Did you know that we offer one:one coaching? Common topics we cover in coaching sessions include:
- Building self-confidence and overcoming impostor syndrome
- Developing strategic thinking skills for a competitive edge
- Increasing your organisational impact and influence
- Mastering delegation, prioritisation, and goal setting for personal and team success
- Navigating complex situations with greater ease and clarity (for example difficult conversations both up and down)
Are any of these a topic of interest for you? If you wish to learn more, either visit: https://blackmill.co/coaching-training/leadership-coaching or book a quick chat with us at https://meet.blackmill.co/blackmill/coaching
What are we reading?
- Toolmen — a literary exploration of AI in various sci-fi books from the ideology of intelligence as a measurable quality and thus increasing intelligence necessarily justifies (exponentially!) increasing resources.
- On ignoring best practices as a competitive advantage — Ryan Kulp, founder of TRMNL, with an explanation of TRMNL's philosophical approach to building their business
- Practical AI techniques for daily engineering work — Sean Goedecke with genuinely practical advice on a few approaches LLMs actually can serve well
If you want to see more interviews here, let us know who we should interview! It can be a friend, colleague, boss, or role model. It can even be yourself. Just email us at gday@blackmill.co
And we’re out
Thank you for showing an interest in our newsletter and we hope that you enjoyed the read. Feel free to contact us if you have any feedback, a burning question, or just a recipe that you would like to share.
Until next time, keep learning!
Everyone at Blackmill