Posts on Jens Rantil

These past years, I have had a lot of people reaching out and wanting to talk “AI” (or LLMs) with me. Either the AI conversations have been around AI strategy for themselves, or for their company. Sometimes they have worked for a company claiming to be “AI first”. Assuming that the conversation is about customer impact (which “AI usage” is not1), my first question is always “What type of AI usage are we talking about here?”

I was once assigned as the onboarding buddy for my then-new colleague Jeff. I had been at the company for five years and was almost a founding engineer. I knew the ins and outs of the company. Not only did I mostly know the way we worked, our company culture, our technical stack, and our design choices, but, more importantly, I had the history and context of how things came to be.

Code freezes commonly stirs up strong emotions within the engineering community. Either people find them useful, or hate them. Some companies have a code freeze on Fridays, others do it over the December holidays, or around important dates when systems must be extra stable, such as Black Friday. Code freeze? Link to heading In short, a code freeze is when changes to a software system are suspended to make it more stable. But the devil is in the details:

The term AI is everywhere these days. Suddenly, it feels like every single company frontpage on the Internet says it is either “an AI company” or “using AI to do X”. It is as if the whole world has discovered that computers can do smart things. But let me tell you what feels like a little secret these days: AI has been around since the 1950s. In 1950, Alan Turing published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, introducing the Turing Test and seriously framing the question of whether machine...