Skip to main content

Applying AI to software development can be like following SatNav

Trying out a different navigation system

A month or so ago I upgraded to a car that has a SatNav system included, so I have been trying to use that instead of the Maps app on my phone. My experiences with it so far have generally been good, but it is far from flawless - a bit like Artificial Intelligence (AI) in software development.

As context, my previous vehicle was not too old to include SatNav, it just hadn't been set up with English language or New Zealand maps - one of the down sides of having a second hand vehicle that originated in Japan.

Flawed or incomplete information

Driving around central Christchurch can be a bit challenging at times as various roadworks are underway, leaving streets closed off or narrowed down to a single lane. It could be reasonable to expect that a basic navigation system might not have up to the minute awareness of those closures and restrictions. However, something that I did not expect to encounter was the navigation system advising me to expect a roundabout where no roundabout exists. This hasn't just been a one off anomaly, so I am having to glance down at the map from time to time to understand whether I should be preparing to turn at these traffic lights or further along.

As I become more accustomed to the prompts coming from the SatNav, I expect that I will be more aligned with the time and distance ahead that the guidance is expected to be related to.

Routing with unclear preferences

I'm not sure why, but on a recent long distance drive the guidance system wanted me to turn off the main highway to go inland to some unfamiliar roads. Normally I would be curious enough to take a little detour and see a different part of the countryside, but on this occasion I had a kitten as a passenger in the back seat so I wanted to stay on the familiar and direct route.

There may have been some marginal difference of total road distance, but I don't know if the inland roads would have been of the same sealed quality as State Highway 1. The only time that I have needed to detour inland around that part of the country before involved gravel roads, where my comfortable driving speed is much lower.

Lower involvement results in lower recall

If I am not actively engaged in the navigation process then I am less likely to remember details of the route for future journeys. If I didn't make an active decision to turn off at a particular place, I will be less likely to absorb that information and have it available for use in the future.

Generating code with AI is like using SatNav

When it comes to software development, I believe that we should be treating artificial intelligence systems with a suitable amount of caution and awareness of the potential limitations and flaws.

I have used AI to generate small one-off utility apps, as well as to produce snippets of code for production systems that process millions of data records every day. Just like we have checks and balances in place to test and review code produced by human developers, I would not allow fully AI generated code to drive my production systems...  ...yet.

Between the chair and the keyboard

The person driving the AI still needs to be around for awareness so that what is being produced will be fit for purpose - meeting the "ity" considerations, such as:

  • functionality 
  • scalability
  • security
  • stability
  • durability
  • flexibility
  • ...

Ethics, and compliance with laws and standards are also aspect that will continue to require people being involved to be held accountable for.

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Having a go at learning some Kotlin

What's this about?  The year 2025 is almost over, so that means that it has been a bit over a decade since my old colleague Filippo gave a presentation to the development team of ScienceDirect covering the merits of the Kotlin programming language. So, it's about time that I had a proper go at using it. This blog post is intended to trace what the experience has been like, covering surprises that I encounter along the way. Getting started The programming language that I am most experienced with is Java, so I have chosen to try out implementing some functionality in Kotlin from a recent hobby project that I developed in Java involving spinning up a database in a Docker container and running some queries. JVM version support IntelliJ IDEA includes some automation for creating a new project, so I selected the relevant options to use the latest LTS version of the Java virtual machine with Spring Boot, Kotlin, Postgresql and Test containers. After a few seconds I had a new project i...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Importance of Segmenting Infrastructure

Kafka for Logging I was recently poking around in the source code of a few technologies that I have been using for a few years when I came across KafkaLog4jAppender. It enables you to use Kafka as a place to capture application logs. The thing that caught my eye was the latest commit associated with that particular class, "KafkaLog4jAppender deadlocks when idempotence is enabled" . In the context of Kafka, idempotence is intended to enable the system to avoid producing duplicate records when a producer may need to retry sending events due to some - hopefully - intermittent connectivity problem between the producer and the receiving broker. The unfortunate situation that arises here is that the Kafka client code itself uses Log4j, so it can result in the application being blocked from sending its logs via a Kafka topic because the Kafka client Producer gets deadlocked waiting on transaction state. Kafka For Metrics - But Not For Kafka Metrics This reminded me of a similar scen...
Post a Comment
Read more

2022 - A year in review

Just a look back over the last 12 months. January I moved back to Christchurch to live, after having spent a few months further south since moving back from London. Work was mainly around balancing other peoples' understanding and expectations around our use of Kafka. February I decided that it would be worthwhile to have a year's subscription for streaming Sky Sports, as some rugby matches that I would want to watch would be on at time when venues wouldn't be open. Having moved to Christchurch to be close to an office, now found myself working from home as Covid restrictions came back into effect across New Zealand. March Got back into some actual coding at work - as opposed to mainly reviewing pull requests for configuration changes for Kafka topics.  This became urgent, as the command line interface tool that our provisioning system was dependent on had been marked for deprecation. April   Had my first direct experience with Covid-19.  I only went for a test because ...
Post a Comment
Read more