You Got LLM In Your ABAP

If you ever had a hankerin' for AI in your ABAP, there are several tools ready to give you a taste. Microsoft and IBM, for two, have made some small waves in months past by promoting their SDKs (maybe check out a past Nerdletter for a few more details).

While I appreciate the support from the big boys, I'm a huge proponent of community-created open-source projects. So I invite you to check out ABAP LLM Client, which slices out some of the hyperscaler-specific stuff to focus on pure LLM integration goodness. Huge shout out to the authors and maintainers.

I have two pieces of unsolicited reflection. Least surprising first: the ABAP world is probably one of the furthest away from adopting AI stuff. The decades-long paradigm has been ABAP doing robust, dependable, reliable enhancement to a huge platform. Businesses lightly patch up the edges of their ERP with it, and have tight specifications for limited ABAP-able actions. The ABAP layer directly calling LLMs will be a paradigm hardly anyone is accustomed to out of the gate, and will take a little bit to get stakeholder buy-in.

The other: examples examples examples! The repository has some tests (which is great), but the community needs to see the real-world scenarios where this LLM client does something useful. That will assist in the buy-in I mentioned earlier, and will also ease the path for our forthcoming robot overlords. PM

This story appeared in Issue 74 of The Boring Enterprise Nerdletter. Subscribe for more stories! https://boringenterprisenerds.substack.com