Clichés, clichés everywhere – the AI albatross
Jon Ayre Why do posts written by AI stand out so badly and say so little? It's obvious if you look at what an LLM does. It encodes the probability of words…
April 2026
So many words but so little meaning
It may come as a surprise to discover that vision models and text models trained on apparently different sets of inputs converge in the same model, but it really shouldn’t.…
Change is coming – but not as fast as you think
You think AI is going to completely change business in 6 months. I know a company that's still replacing lotus notes and another that uses carbon paper to make triplicate…
Fixing tech debt is never a Jira ticket
One of the most common complaints from development teams is that they're never given time to address technical debt. Every ticket is a feature change or bug fix, and never…
Tearing down the software development walls
In software development, the handoff of work from Product Manager to Engineer to QA was always an anti-pattern. It's a shame it's taken AI to wake people up to that…
The cat and the gun – an AI intelligence analogy
I love analogies, and I also love cats. So here's a cat based analogy that attempts to explain why the apparent intelligence some people are seeing in LLMs is just…
Look into my crystal ball if you dare
I predicted Meta would fail in its VR venture, and Apple would struggle to sell its headset. I said Amazon would get nowhere quickly with its drone delivery plans if…
Money, money, money, or burn baby burn?
The AI cost issue is already rearing its head. People are using workarounds, and AI companies aren't even charging a fraction of what it costs to run the models. What…
It’s English Jim, but not as we know it
If you think talking in plain English to an LLM (large language model) will produce a coded solution that does what you want, does it well and will stand the…
The software engineer is dead, long live the software engineer!
The IT industry is only ever as good as the software it produces. There has always been great software, and there has also always been a lot of bad software.