Prompting Isn’t The Most Important Skill
Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor and of the founders of the EdX educational platform, recently created a stir by saying that prompt engineering was the most important skill you could…
Automated Mentoring with ChatGPT
Ethan and Lilach Mollick’s paper Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students with Prompts explores seven ways to use AI in teaching. (While this paper is eminently readable, there is a…
Structural Evolutions in Data
I am wired to constantly ask “what’s next?” Sometimes, the answer is: “more of the same.” That came to mind when a friend raised a point about emerging technology’s fractal nature.…
The Real Problem with Software Development
A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet that said “Writing code isn’t the problem. Controlling complexity is.” I wish I could remember who said that; I will be quoting…
The next generation of developer productivity
To follow up on our previous survey about low-code and no-code tools, we decided to run another short survey about tools specifically for software developers—including, but not limited to, GitHub…
The ChatGPT Surge
I’m sure that nobody will be surprised that the number of searches for ChatGPT on the O’Reilly learning platform skyrocketed after its release in November, 2022. It might be a…
Real-Real-World Programming with ChatGPT
If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve played around with using AI tools like ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot to write code for you. Or even if you haven’t yet, then…
Teaching Programming in the Age of ChatGPT
Imagine for a minute that you’re a programming instructor who’s spent many hours making creative homework problems to introduce your students to the world of programming. One day, a colleague…
Fearing the Wrong Thing
There’s a lot of angst about software developers “losing their jobs” to AI, being replaced by a more intelligent version of ChatGPT, GitHub’s Copilot, Google’s Codey, or something similar. Matt…
Risk Management for AI Chatbots
Does your company plan to release an AI chatbot, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard? Doing so means giving the general public a freeform text box for interacting with…