My AI Bet Has Paid Off
This is a “share my joy” post. What a day I had. I’ve tried to whittle this down. I’d LOVE to give the blow by blow of how amazing today was. Instead I think the directional arc is the signal in the noise.
At work, my day job, at a client - I for the FIRST time got to use agentic AI tools to do work. No sneaking, no doing work on my own PC and emailing it. No using ChatGPT when it wan’t yet approved.
I’m on an extremely vital project that has visibility at the highest levels. 20 other projects have my project as a choke point. I was put into the frying pan from the start. I was selected by an executive who sought for quite awhile to find the one person with all my talents. She snagged me from another important project (lead architect on a 7 figure, longer than a year project). I need Lee, and I need all his other work removed.
I said from the beginning (6 weeks ago) - that I can do my work without AI, of course. But if you allow me the AI tools, I can do work at a much higher velocity. Red tape had to be cut, mountains moved, but the executive made sure I was put on the pilot of Github CoPilot. And today was the day.
And I KICKED ASS. I delivered three things that would have taken two weeks to do and wrote up two case studies about how I used the AI tool. The AI leader who had said “we will put you in the pilot and give someone to shadow you to write the case study” was BLOWN AWAY. I didn’t need a shadow. “This case study is amazing, far more than we had in mind”. And then two hours later I had finished another deliverable and with it a case study. My chat group message: I promised productivity - here is a second case study about a day’s work I complete in an hour removing the need for repeated manual work.
Then I went on with the remaining 4 hours of the day to complete Monday’s deliverable that I had major doubts of meeting. Thought I’d be working late nights and all weekend. Instead I have all day tomorrow to test and refine.
I’m not “participating in a pilot” program. I’ve been working with GenAI for three years, and agentic coding since last summer. I’ve been spending my nights and weekends lately on an exciting personal project using agentic AI.
Today it showed. Today I was the guy who walked into the piano store, sat down and played the Rach 2.