I work on AI

I’m starting to think AI is the actual domain of the work. Not software development. Not product. Not finance.

I watched this AI training recently that kept saying “AI is a tool, AI is a tool” and I’m reflecting on a recent comment I’ve made to colleagues, mentees, and readers:

“People, processes, tools … and AI. There’s a new fourth item to the centuries-old triad of organizing work.”

AI is NOT a tool. It’s its own, separate thing. And so is “working on AI” even if what you’re doing day to day is not doing AI research or AI engineering at a SOTA lab.

When working on [domain] with AI, there’s as much craft and expertise in the AI part as there is in the domain part.

Perhaps, with time, even more so.

And to illustrate how I’m changing how I see “what I do” .. let me share a bunch of anecdotes of how I’ve been helping my friends and family since the advent of AI.

You’re in IT, right?

After one of our cat's appointments, my vet asked me: "You're in IT, right?"

Usually that means "can you fix my computer?" I reluctantly said yes.

She showed me her lab. For every exam, she'd read the results off the machine, type them into an Excel sheet one by one, look up the reference ranges for that species and age, print it, and save it as a PDF to send to the client via WhatsApp.

My wife said, “You should use AI!” “No. I hate AI. People come here every day saying ChatGPT said this, ChatGPT said that. It's a terrible invention.”

I said I’d help her.

I took pictures of her machines and their printouts, and she sent her Excel sheets to my wife over WhatsApp. Friday evening, while watching Fraj recover, I used my phone to set up a Grokbot account with all the necessary setup to read her lab results from machine or printout pictures and save a PDF.

On Monday I showed it to her. She didn't believe it. "You just ask it? And it asks me if it's missing something, and otherwise it just does it? I don't have to do anything? Wow, I’m gonna eat pizza tonight!!”

For $20 a month.

Thanks to what I do now.

What do you do, Dui?

I've always had a hard time answering “what do you do?” despite my close to 25 years of professional experience. Software Engineer. Manager. Executive. Work on Security. Education. Payments. Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.

Even as recently as a year ago, I couldn’t have helped my vet with her problem. Whatever solution I had for her as a software engineer, she certainly couldn’t afford it.

Now I can help her in an evening on my phone.

So I don’t know. Back then, I used to think I did software development. Then, I did software development.. with AI, as a tool.

Now I think I work on AI.. with software development, as a tool. The more I think about it, the more I believe software development is not using AI anymore. It’s AI that is using software development.

Software is not the thing solving the problems anymore.

AI is.

And it’s making it a lot easier for me to solve problems.

My father-in-law

My father-in-law bought a Real Madrid shirt in Madrid as a gift for his grandson, but couldn’t get it customized because they were missing a number and one of the letters he needed. He returned it right away to buy a new one at a different store, but never got the refund.

Three months later he asked me if I could help because he still had no refund. Besides, he didn’t know but he had filed a chargeback on both the old and the new shirts (by mistake), and both as fraud claims (again by mistake), both declined.

A few emails later, he got his €160 back. I didn’t write a single email. Claude even found the original issue on the picture of the slip he sent me, “Tarjeta Manual” — they never processed the refund.

Before, this would have taken me a reluctant yes and several hours of work and distraction.

This time, it was an easy yes and literally negligible work.

My brother-in-law

My wife's brother builds sewers and piping for cities. He was already using ChatGPT, so I told him: "Instead of ChatGPT, use Codex.” (That was before OpenAI Work, which is even better for this now.) I gave him very simple principles:

“Tell it to build things for you, instead of telling you things. Whenever it asks you to do something, tell it to do it for you instead.”

He used it to prepare a bid for a huge public tender for his job. Codex helped him study every detail, and practice both the pitch and the Q&A. The evaluators told him it was the most well-prepared bid and presentation they had ever seen.

Ever.

I told him to use Grokbot and now he has a bot for each department of his company, helping him run it and stay on top of things.

My sister-in-law's boyfriend

My sister-in-law's boyfriend refurbishes alveographs, the machines that test the strength of flour dough. His readings came through an Arduino he wired to a pressure sensor, into Delphi software a friend wrote. It didn't run on the latest Windows, and the friend had left software to drive for Uber.

At a pizza night, I told him, "come over sometime, we'll build you new software in an afternoon." He was doubtful, but he came, joined by my best friend Gustavo. Between the three of us chatting and drinking non-alcoholic beer, it took about an hour of actual work: the new software, the sensor reading, tests against the old software, and a Codex setup he could use to update the software himself.

Five days later he emailed me a changelog. A changelog!!

“I really had no idea what would be possible.”

He's using GitHub now, with his own Claude and Codex accounts, and his tool is running at his clients. He doesn't depend on anyone anymore, including me.

And my wife

The person I spend the most time helping is my wife. I built Nanonu, a nutrition app, for the two of us. You take a picture of your plate, and it tells you what's in it, down to the iron and vitamin D.

Earlier this week she walked into her doctor’s office with an interactive HTML report from the app, three weeks of meals, protein, water and workouts, since her last visit. The doctor said it was the most detailed report a patient had ever brought her.

She’s never been healthier.

This weekend, I’m sharing it with my in-laws and friends. I hope they’ll be healthier, too.

Helping with AI

I'm excited by the prospect of helping people I care about, like friends and family, with my work. That was never possible before, and it’s only available to me because of AI.

And it’s not just software. Yes, AI makes it much easier for me to write software, but importantly, it makes it much easier for me to solve problems. Software used computers to solve problems, and AI is still computers solving problems.

So this is changing my perspective on what I can and should do, perhaps for the first time since I started my career in software development when I graduated back in 2003 (gosh, I’m old).

Before, a lot of my thinking was “how can I solve problems with software?”

Now.. I think “how can I solve problems with AI?”