It’s A Matter of Framework

As we integrate AI into IT the landscape, things will be changing rapidly.?There are a myriad of soft wares out there as well as a growing number of cloud providers, containers, and orchestration platforms that make the IT landscape more and more complicated and specialized.?This has some significant effects on the way system, application, and software engineers will approach their tasks and projects in coming years.?Adding the power of AI into the mix will bring about profound changes in the way engineers tackle knowledge and methodology.?I believe we will have to focus more and more on understanding the framework of many technologies rather than focusing on the details of a few.??

Knowing the basics of software engineering, applications, and the 3 tier model in depth born out of ?a wealth of experience will become the most valuable characteristic, as it should be, of an effective and productive engineer.?As the field of technologies within each discipline grows at a geometric rate, knowing the details of each operating system and application software will become more and more elusive. What I see as the remedy for this problem is the change in paradigm from knowing the tiny details to knowing the larger frameworks and using tools such as ChatGPT to fill in the details on demand.??

After a few months of working with ChatGPT,?I have found that language model, with its incredibly vast knowledge base to be the tool for asking how to questions as well as even requesting code examples for effective Ansible, Kubernetes and system management. In addition, the speed with which it brings back answers is mightily impressive. This means that we as engineers no longer have to rely on a very detailed memory of various commands and command line options to get things done.?Now with these tools it becomes more about what the big picture might be combined with ?what the overall data goals might be.??Engineers can focus more on why a NIC should be teamed as well as how to trouble shoot an issues with them rather than try to memorize the exact commands that might be used to bring about teaming.??A quick question to ChatGPT for the particular operating system in question and the detailed and highly accurate answer is seconds away.?And this is where the language model excels.??Rather than doing the Google search and agonizing over the correct key words and how they should be placed between ANDs and ORs, the question that needs answered is plainly typed and the Chat Model goes out and gathers the data, manuals, and web pages and refines and compiles them into an answer that has a very high probability of being correct.?Therefore the reliability and speed of getting things from various sources on the web have improved to the point where there is little advantage to having the photographic memory that seems to be erroneously, the most desirable, trait in a system engineer.

The quality that is emerging, and for some of us should have been at the top of the heap much sooner, is the ability to understand the realities of operating systems, applications and the 3 tier model.??If an engineer understands these and their interaction very well,?using the new tools for installation, configuration and troubleshooting parameters, becomes less and less an exercise in photographic memory recall.??And,?as we all know, memories are fallible and verifying the accuracy of the same is a very prudent skill to learn.?Therefore using the ChatGPT is not only freeing up the mind for more practical pursuits in IT, it also serves as a tool to verify the actions that are to be taken in configuration and troubleshooting prior to moving forward.??

Therefore as the models become more and more able, there will be less and less of a need to dwell on the details of engineering and more and more of a need to understand the depths and nuances of the framework.?The language model,?at first will handle the details and then ultimately will be taking on the details and even writing code to ensure functionality.?The emphasis will therefore shift a depth of understanding of the frameworks of IT in terms of operating systems, networking,?applications and storage.?This is the wave of the future that seems to be breaking at warp speed.?