The growth of the "Looks Good to Me" attitude to AI reviews

 Recently, there has been a huge growth in the practice of using AI for writing code. This has led to some unscrupulous management teams to using AI efficiency as an excuse to get rid of many of the software engineers.

While AI is good at writing code, it is not so good at other steps in the software development life cycle such as code review (particularly if there is an ambiguous spec). As a result of this, the smaller remaining team of software engineer is left with a huge volume of AI written code to review. It takes time to properly review code and the temptation is to have a quick look at the code and then write "Looks Good To Me" (or even abbreviate it to LGTM)

This hilarious song video was written with Claude and looks at what happens when a fictitious company combines a management team keen to maximise use of AI and a team of engineers doing LGTM style code reviews.

PowerPoint presentation coach

 I just discovered a very useful feature of PowerPoint called "performance coach". It allows you to practice presenting your slides and get feedback from an AI based coach.

To access this feature, you click on "slide show" in the menu ribbon at the top of the screen. Then you click on the "rehearse with coach" button. The presentation will launch in the usual screen show mode, but the microphone is recording what you say and it will give you feedback such as:

• Speaking too fast or slow
• Excessive use of fillers such s "ehh" or 'um'
• Speaking in a monotone voice

You can stop the coach by clicking on the microphone icon and selecting the pause option. It will then give you an overall feedback report on your presentation style.

Go on try it out!

Is AI able to write a good song?

 

There is a lot of hype recently about Artificial Intelligence and so I decided to try out how good it would be at composing a song.

I used ChatGPT. First I fed it some basic facts about my daughter and her new husband. Then I asked it to write a song about them in the style of Christy Moore. Here is a video of my brother performing the song at their post wedding party.

I think the result is pretty impressive. Let me know what you think.

I don't think this song is going to be top of the charts, but if it was their might be a fight over who deserves to get the royalties. Is it me, my brother, Christy Moore or the creators of ChatGPT.

Moving to the Watson Lab Services team

I have recently changed jobs. I still work for IBM, but now I am part of the lab services team for the Watson family of products.

The Watson offerings are essentially a productised version of all of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) abilities which were developed as part of the initiative to teach a computer to play the Jeopardy game show. This game show is not popular on this side of the Atlantic, but fans of the program assure me that it is an amazing achievement and so I am very excited to be working with such leading edge technology.

As you would expect, customers sometimes have trouble understanding how to best use these advanced technologies. My team's mission is to help customers get over any initial hurdles and get maximum benefit from these amazing new services.

As part of this role, I will be posting a few articles on this newly established Blog with technical tips and tricks. I hope they prove useful!