Notes from Venkat Subramaniam’s talk, “Power and Perils of AI Aided Coding”, at Tampa Java User Group (August 26, 2026)

We’ve had full houses at tech meetups at KForce heaquarters before, but never this full! It was a packed room last Wednesday, with everyone there to see Dr. Venkat Subramaniam give his talk, Power and Perils of AI Aided Coding. For those of you who couldn’t make it, as well as for those of you who did, and want a recap, here are my notes. What AI is and isn’t “It is not intelligent,” said Venkat as he started his talk. “This is one of the myths we carry around with us.” He’d recently been in Switzerland, where a colleague told him about the AI tool she’d been using. She asked whether she should call the AI “he” or “she”, and Venkat’s was the same as the one I would give: “It’s called it. When I use a hammer, I don’t say ‘I like him.’” His own expansion of the acronym “AI”, which he told us at his appearance in Tampa, is Accelerated Inference. AI as we know it today an extraordinarily fast inference engine. Inference is something we do too, albeit more slowly, and with a hard ceiling…