Questions About AI Use In Companies

I have many questions as we figure out how to use generative AI.

Peter Checkland has a model that (simplifed) says that things happen – life is a flux of ideas and events.

We engage with this flux with standards. We learn from our experiences. And we modify our standards. So what are the standards that we need to think about now?

This is a non-exhaustive list for working with AI – again, more questions and observations than answers.

Monolithic or hierarchical?

Is it better to work on one big project – try and create it end to end in one-shot or work on and assemble components? The larger something gets, the more complex it is. It looks like Deep Research takes the component approach and builds up over time.

Expert Mode or Collaborative?

Should we work on projects together or have an expert go away and build tools to a specification? I’m seeing the return of interest in Extreme Programming (XP), which has pair programming as a collaborative building approach. Will we see that come back?

Exploration vs Deployment.

When you can build anything, what do you focus on? How do you move from having a mockup to something that can be used in production? Is it an extension of what you’ve made, or is it a rebuild?

The legal aspect.

This seems a thorny issue. Who owns the output of LLMs?

Let’s say you use an LLM to write code for your app. The chances are that your competition is doing the same. So, if you have the same code in both your applications, how does that work?

As far as I know you can’t copyright the output from a machine, so now is all code fair play? What if you mix this generated code with your own IP?

Cognitive accessibility

LLMs produce information far quicker than we can process them. There is a limit on what we can take in, so how are we going to reduce the flow of information so that we can actually make sense of it. I saw a post recently that said you can check 10 lines of code, but 500 is probably fine. What happens if your 200 page strategy deck goes unread and accepted because it takes too long?

Standards

We are going into this space with standards – IP protections, data management, work processes, that are being upended.

There’s a race to limit protections to support rapid development. There is a race on, and it looks like winning matters more than following rules.

Is that the new standard companies have to sign up to in order to stay relevant? Move fast and worry about the consequences later?

So many questions… You probably have more.