It’s unbelievable that ChatGPT was released to the public early this year and less than a year later, we are now in the midst of the AI boom. Every day when I open up my reading list of blogs, news sites, and newsletters, I read of companies either pivoting to AI, adding AI to their product mix, or new companies created with the mantra of AI first. In all my years of being in the e-commerce industry working on online to offline, omnichannel, and other various initiatives.

“We are pragmatists. We don’t stick to any ideology. Does it work? Let’s try it, and if it does work, fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one. We are not enamored with any ideology.” - Lee Kuan Yew Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s elder statesman, was a practical man who believed in trying out new things to see if they worked. He was not afraid to start from scratch if something did not yield the expected results.

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” - Pablo Picasso I have been hearing a lot about using ChatGPT for developers and depending on your point of view, it will either steal your job and make you obsolete, or give you a boost in your day to day work as a SWE. So I had to write a program that was supposed to take a form input and then call an API to store it on our MongoDB hosted on AWS.

“Pain is your friend” - Master Chief John Urgayle That is not good. In the tech industry. Pain is not your friend. You know what is your friend? Boring is your friend. Pain is what you get when you convert your backend code from PHP to Java Spring Boot because it is a sexy framework although the last time you did Java was in university 12 years ago, and then the GC starts thrashing and your boss is calling you at 3am telling you that customers are calling him and screaming his head off as the frontend interface doesn’t load for them.

“I know one thing, that I know nothing” - Socrates When I first started out in my career years ago. I thought I was going to conquer the world with my energy, exuberance and brains. Needless to say, the world had an inversely proportionate response and here I am, 20 years later. Much more humbled and wise and more chilled. Even now, I realize that there is still a lot that I don’t know and that I have much to learn.

It’s been a while since my last post as I have been busy with my projects at Mighty Jaxx, especially related to the e-commerce side of things. I recently had a good chat with Kestrel Lee who is a Creative Director based in China and he brought up a point of using LLMs to create chatbots to serve as the first line of customer support for common customer queries. So instead of hiring an army of customer service agents, you can reduce it to a small number of real life customer support agents who will answer more complicated queries while the LLMs based chatbots will handle the most mundane queries.