Is AI eating the software world? An essay

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Daniel Miessler has posted a provocative essay with the attention-grabbing headline: "How AI is Eating the Software World". (*) He subtitles his essay this way:

The future of software is asking smart questions to a mesh of APIs running layered models

Meissler posits three architectures:

1. "Outcomes" which is pretty much conventional software design: Inputs, controls, task or process, and outcomes.
2. "Understanding" which he thinks is the not-too-distant world of generative AI. A progressing stack of data (unorganized and unevaluated), information (organized data), knowledge (integrated information), and understanding (all before applied in context with situational awareness)
3. "SPA" which he has coined for "state" (present situation, but multi-dimensional), "policy" (... "which is your desired state and the set of things you want and don’t want to happen"), and "action" (..."which is the recommendations or actions that can be performed to bring the STATE in line with the POLICY.")

Eventually, the software that runs a project or a business will be defined by a number of APIs that address various layers of multi-dimensional sources of "understanding" but work in a SPA kind of architecture. 

Need something new in the SPA? Define an API, or buy it from someone else. 

Need to offer something to a customer? Give them access to an API that pulls from your company's value-add stack of "understanding". 

Now Miessler readily admits that the current generation of generative AI tools are not ready for business or project prime time because what you get is not predictable or necessarily repeatable (if you run a generative AI query 10 times you are likely to get 10 different answers. That's a no-no for most business or project processes)

Like I said, a provocative essay.

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(*) An essay from 2011 by Marc Andreessen, with a similar title, is this one: "Why Software is Eating the World"

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Design thinking -- agile for not-software?

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"Design Thinking" is a term of art. Many are accredited with its coinage: early on Herbert Simon writing in The Sciences of the Artificial in 1969, but probably most prominently by David Kelley -- founder of product design firm IDEO.

A really good comparison of 'design thinking' and traditional management thinking is given in the slideshare presentation embedded below. Some really good insight is given on pages

However, you might also want to hear it directly from it's most articulate spokesman, David Kelley: here he is in a recent 60 Minutes interview making these key points: (and, take note of the agile-like envisioning, story-like requirements, and user feedback shown in the interview)

• Design thinking incorporates human behavior into design
• Diversity of talent and experience is required on teams... arts, engineering, science
• Teamers have to be good at building on other's ideas
• Requirements are developed by observation of user behavior/actions
• Emphasis on prototyping; focus on what's intuitive for human utility
• Empathy for the human need is key to everything
• Applicable to tangible products, environment experience, processes, and other

Steve Jobs was IDEO's early client that really drove the company to excel. The mouse was on of the prominent early products in the Apple-IDEO collaboration.

In the slideshare below, we learn that abduction, a logical complement to induction and deduction, is what really makes design thinking go.

When you put all this all together, it's pretty obviously agile for non-software!

Design Thinking - Presentation from Jan Schmiedgen

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Abduction, anyone?

If you're not a regular reader of BusinessWeek you may have missed the January 14th (2010) missive in their regular Innovations column. Here we have one that is close to the heart of many project managers:

the accidental nemesis to a really new-to-the-world idea, or as the authors put it: the 'accidental enemy'

In their column, entitled "Innovation's Accidental Enemies", authors Roger L. Martin and Jennifer Riel , academics at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto , posit that too many executives manage when they should lead: to wit, they rely too often on inductive and deductive reasoning.  They fail to embrace abductive reasoning when confronted with a never-done-before idea for project excecution.  In doing so, they become the accidental enemy of a radically new idea.

What, say you, is abductive reasoning?  It's the third leg of inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning.  One only needs to search a bit in Wikipedia to get the ideas.

Inductive and deductive reasoning are the two we're most familiar with; they align rules and data--either the rules beget the data, or the data begs the rules. These situations are a traditional manager's view of putting the enterprise's rules with the situational facts.  Nothing wrong with that---some of my best friends are inductive or deductive reasoners--but even though one or the other works well in many situations, they don't always work when innovation is the order of the day.

• Innovative ideas many times do not comport with established rules.  That lets out deductive reasoning. 
• Innovative concepts are often free of facts, and seemingly lack cohesion and coherence among the available data.  That lets out inductive reasoning.

So, what do you do when faced with seeming unrelated facts or ideas that don't appear to connect? Abduction reasoning may be an approach.  To reason abductively is to postulate or hypothesize a situation that might be rational or consistent for what is known, but it may require a few leaps over the missing. Thus, it may be necessary to fill in the plot holes, as it were.

Haven't we heard endlessly about connecting the dots?  Well, having a skill, and a tolerance, for the emergence of a new idea by abductive reasoning is key to having visionary foresight. In an article in Strategy+Business, authors Tim Laseter and Saras Sarasvathy call making something out of seemingly nothing (or a lot of somethings that don't seem to relate) "constructive transformation". (I've not heard that one before, but I'm always open to a new idea). According to their idea, constructive transformers:

"... use the vagaries of fate to help them proactively shape their environment."

The genius of innovators is not to let their management impulses overwhelm their instincts to inspire, motivate, and empower.

Marc Andreessen--innovator and venture capitalist extraordinaire--said something similar in a recent interview: the mission of technology companies is to innovate, in effect: to continuously renew, even if it means to renew with legacy destruction.

Recall this witicism from RAdmiral Grace Hopper [esteemed software leader who, among other things, invented the 'bug']:

"Things are managed; people are led"

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Innovation and the accidental nemesis

If you're not a regular reader of BusinessWeek you may have missed the January 14th missive in their regular Innovations column. Here we have one that is close to the heart of many project managers: the accidental nemesis to a really new-to-the-world idea, or as the authors put it: the 'accidental enemy'

In their column, entitled "Innovation's Accidental Enemies", authors Roger L. Martin and Jennifer Riel , academics at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto , posit that too many executives manage when they should lead: to wit, they rely too often on inductive and deductive reasoning.  They fail to embrace abductive reasoning when confronted with a never-done-before idea for project excecution.  In doing so, they become the accidental enemy of a radically new idea.

What, say you, is abductive reasoning?  It's the third leg of inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning.  One only needs to search a bit in Wikipedia to get the ideas.

Inductive and deductive reasoning aligns rules and data--either one or the other begets the other--a traditional manager's view of putting the enterprise's rules with the situational facts.  Nothing wrong with that---some of my best friends are inductive or deductive reasoners--but even though one or the other works well in many situations, they don't always work when innovation is the order of the day.

Innovative ideas many times do not comport with established rules.  That lets out deductive reasoning.  Innovative concepts are often free of facts and seemingly lack cohesion and coherence among the available data.  That lets out inductive reasoning.

Abduction is reasoning through, or postulating, or hypothesizing that seeming unrelated facts or ideas indeed do connect.  Haven't we heard endlessly about connecting the dots?  Well, having a skill, and a tolerance, for the emergence of a new idea by abductive reasoning is key to having visionary foresight.

The genius of innovators is not to let their management impulses overwhelm their instincts to inspire, motivate, and empower.

Recall this witicism from Rear Admiral Grace Hopper [esteemed software leader who, among other things, invented the 'bug']: "Things are managed; people are led"

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