Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

A Place Where AI Can Help

IT Leadership, ,

IBM stock dropped 13% on the news that Claude Code can now refactor COBOL. That might be bad for IBM, but it is good for the wider IT world.

Using an LLM inductively—writing a lot of code from a short prompt—allows it to confabulate over-complex and buggy code. But using an LLM deductively—distilling knowledge from a larger data set—is a place where the AI can do something well that humans are not very good at.

Since the beginning of programming, we have struggled with documentation. Everybody who has been in the industry for a while has experienced being thrown into a swamp of inconsistent, badly documented code with the instruction to fix it.

I’m not afraid that AI will put us all out of a job. We have a gazillion lines of legacy code that need refactoring. That has been prohibitively expensive until now. With modern AI tools, we have a chance to make a dent in the problem.

Time or Money?

Spiritual Programmer, ,

Do you need more time or more money? Every once in a while, we reach an inflection point in our lives. Something happens that makes us reconsider what we do. Maybe you are laid off, or you experience a health scare for yourself or a loved one.

In these situations, your job or entire career is suddenly up for negotiation.

Many people I coach have assembled an eclectic palette of specific choices and ask for help choosing among them. But the first step is to make a very basic choice: Do I want more time or more money? Work is trading time for money. Reflect on what is most important to you at this point in your life.

Who Gets the Blame?

IT Leadership, ,

We’re starting to see AI bots doing damage, even in professional organizations. Those of us who work professionally with IT have watched with horrified fascination as gullible end users entrust their Openclaw/Clawdbot with their credentials and credit cards, but that is personal experiments. Now the problem is spreading.

At AWS, the AI bots inherit the authorization of the user running them. That means that if a user is entrusted with the power to delete an environment, the AI bot can also do so. As it did. The outage seems to have been limited to one service in one region. Interestingly, AWS blames the error on the human engineer who let the bot loose, not on the bot. It reminds me of how Boing and Airbus always try to blame all crashes on “Pilot Error.”

Share this story at your next team meeting and discuss if it could happen in your organization. And think about who would get the blame…

Excessive Quality

IT Leadership

Excessive quality is “muda” – waste. If you’ve been exposed to Lean, you know the seven types of waste. One of the common ones in IT is overprocessing. Building high-quality software for a temporary need is overprocessing.

Much of the discussion about crappy AI-generated code fails to make the distinction between critical systems that lives depend upon and which will be maintained for decades, and one-off temporary solutions.

Spending scarce human programmer resources on building tactical, short-lived systems is overprocessing. Let the AI build it.

Useful and Useless Time

Spiritual Programmer,

There are two ways you can spend the precious minutes you have been allocated in this life: Useful and Useless.

Working and personal development are useful. But so is sleeping and doing the dishes. Useless time is doomscrolling and watching mediocre TV series.

To find out how much you are doing of each, start a timer on your phone every time you start doing something useful (including sleeping, personal hygiene, etc.). Stop it when you are done. At the end of the day, look at your numbers. Are you happy with the way you spent your time?

Losing the Picture

IT Leadership,

The fear of every Air Traffic Controller is “losing the picture.” That is the situation where your mental model of where everyone is and where they are going starts breaking down. It is very hard to regain the picture, and the controller will ask for help. Usually, the supervisor will split the sector and assign the relief controller to one half of it.

I have often seen IT organizations that have “lost the picture,” but there is never a relief controller available to step in. They simply continue struggling to keep the system running while the bug reports and enhancement requests pile up.

The number one reason why a team loses the picture used to be that the complexity grows until it reaches the limit of what the team can handle, and then the most experienced person leaves. That is hard enough to handle. Today, some teams are happily letting AI tools build code they don’t understand, even from the beginning. They are rapidly losing the picture, as the emerging horror stories about teams drowning in AI code clearly show.

What Does Succes Look Like?

Spiritual Programmer, ,

Was yesterday a success for you? Most people can’t answer that question because they have not thought about what a successful day looks like.

Setting a goal and achieving it has a major impact on your happiness. Interestingly, it does not have to be a big, audacious goal. Setting a simple goal like “today I will answer that email that I’ve been avoiding” is enough.

Take a moment to define success for tomorrow. You’ll find that it becomes very likely that you do the task you envision. And you’ll be happier afterwards.

The Usability War

IT Leadership,

When your users don’t like what you offer, they will use something else. If your secure communication app is cumbersome and slow, people will take to insecure but user-friendly commercial software.

The U.S. Secretary of War couldn’t be bothered to use the Pentagon-supplied app and leaked classified information on WhatsApp. Now, Russia is restricting Telegram only to figure out that its soldiers in Ukraine depend on it.

Have you compared usage data with expected usage? If those numbers are far apart, it means your users are finding other ways.

Invisible Problems

IT Leadership, ,

“We don’t see a problem.” That is the typical response when a company is investigated for unsafe products or features. Latest car in point: Ford’s BlueCruise self-driving feature.

They might be right in claiming that customers have not reported problems to them. But when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) started to take an interest, they could easily compile 2,000 claims of malfunctioning self-driving features.

How are you gathering customer feedback? The fact that you don’t receive any problem reports doesn’t mean there are no problems.

The 996 Fallacy

Spiritual Programmer,

996 working is back in fashion. That means working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. The concept originated in China, but AI startups in The U.S. had taken it up with a vengeance.

It is a stupid idea, conflating effort with results. You need a certain amount of effort to produce a result, but more effort does not translate linearly into more results. The science shows that productivity tapers off after 40 hours a week, and workers doing 70 hours so not produce more than workers doing 50 hours.

If you are working on your own startup or have another good reason, by all means put in some extra effort. But don’t sacrifice your health for someone else’s agenda.