Constantine Fry

Unpopular Opinion: Experienced developers who '10x' themselves using AI are full of it. Sorry, I literally do not believe you. Of all the posts I've read of experienced SW developers who claim AI has made them '10x' more productive (and yes there are LOTs who literally say this) - not one has shown any evidence . The best I have seen is people who say "I finished this project in X days with AI and it WOULD HAVE taken me 10X days without AI'. Oh ? and how do you know that? One of the most important thing I have learned from 40+ years of SW development - 'we' suck at estimating how long things will take. Really Really Badly. Finally people have started doing scientific-ish studies to validate these claims. First result hot-off-the presses - 5+ year experienced SW developers given random real tasks performed 19% slower using AI then not. AND - most interesting, they believed they did it 20% faster. https://lnkd.in/gYSW4C8i

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Generative AI and Character Design: An overview of Zuraverse's Approach I had a fascinating conversation with my best buddy, Abhishek Sagar , the founder of Zuraverse.xyz, about how his team leverages generative AI for character design. It's a complex challenge, especially for a gaming platform with thousands of unique, NFT-based characters that need to maintain consistency while remaining true to their core identity. Abhishek shared some great insights, particularly their method of creating highly descriptive character prompts. Instead of generic descriptors, they use multi-layered strategy for character design consistency: • Prompt Engineering: They use a "recipe" of descriptive elements for each character. This goes beyond just physical appearance and includes: • Core Visuals: Specific details on body shape, color palette, unique markings (scars, tattoos), and accessories (a glowing sword, a specific type of armor). • Personality & Emotional Cues: Describing a "mischievous rogue with a sly grin" or a "somber sorceress with a furrowed brow" helps the AI generate consistent facial expressions and body language. • Style Cues: They include instructions to maintain a specific art style, whether it's "hyper-realistic," "anime-style," or "dark fantasy," to ensure all characters in a specific game universe look cohesive. • Reference Images: In addition to text, Zuraverse uses a core set of reference images for each character. This allows the AI to learn and replicate a character's "look and feel" with much greater accuracy, even when generating the character in new situations, poses, or wearing different outfits. • Agentic AI for Iteration: Abhishek also gave me a sneak peek into his journey with agentic AI. They are not just using a simple text-to-image generator. They're building AI agents that can take the initial character prompt and a set of rules, and then autonomously iterate on the design. This would allow the system to generate hundreds of variations—different outfits, poses, and expressions—while ensuring each one adheres to the character's core design principles. This isn't just theory—it's a practical application of AI by industry experts to tackle a real-world problem. Abhishek also promised that he will be sharing more details in the form of hands-on examples and podcasts in the coming weeks for the benefit of new explorers in his field. Feel free to checkout what zuraverse is Upto at: Zuraverse Story: https://lnkd.in/gz6Wuc4V Zuraverse: https://zuraverse.xyz Review: https://lnkd.in/gqkTSNxK #GenerativeAI #AIinGaming #Zuraverse #CharacterDesign #NFT #Gaming #AIagents #Innovation

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🛑 stop aiming for deadlines 📈start aiming for outcomes 🔁 optimise for sustainable pace 📦 deliver working software frequently 🔍 identify constraints, remove them, repeat 📊 measure the one certainty we do have is the lack of it, optimise to mitigate that, trying to pin down uncertainty in software is often futile

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Yesterday at WeAreDevelopers Berlin, I was struck by how much attention Micro Frontends are getting. Solutions ranged from modern standard web APIs such as importmap and Web Components to Open Source projects such as Module Federation and Web Fragments. It’s great to see the pattern maturing and becoming more mainstream for scaling frontend applications. But, I feel that many companies are still fixated on trying to solve issues by breaking up their front-end application too roughly, without establishing a stronger core or 'shell'. For example, they try to support different major versions of the same framework, or even different frameworks. A smarter middle ground exists with a layer that exposes everything a microfrontend needs, providing central capabilities even down to framework primitives without delegating dependency management. It requires a bit a work upfront and a frontend platform team but it will pay dividends. As highlighted in the talks, with a micro frontend architecture, you would anyway eventually require such a team.

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Having spent the last two days at QCon, I had several chats with engineers who wanted to know what 'AI Engineering' as a role meant. Pete Hamilton's written about why we've created the role which is where I pointed most people. The tl;dr is you do different work than Product Engineering, and we're betting on the specialisation only becoming more relevant in future. Explaining this to people, their next question was "that makes sense, but why would I switch? what would this mean for me, in terms of my career?" When I switched role to SRE, Norberto (my manager at the time) gave me a list of pros-and-cons around what it would mean for my career. He emphasised parts of the role that would develop certain skills, and was honest about what I'd lose moving away from normal engineering. I've tried writing-up a similar list for anyone considering the switch to AI Engineering, hoping to return the favour! It covers: - Why AI engineering is one of the most powerful career accelerants available right now - What you'll learn from battling AI's technical challenges - That you'll build less visible product than you might in other roles and what that means Link to the post is in 🧵

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Blogged: Creating a software bill of materials (SBOM) for an open-source NuGet package https://lnkd.in/eRcNDHTY In this post I discuss several tools you can use to create a software bill of materials (SBOM) for an application or a NuGet package #nuget #security

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