Knowledge and netiquette in today's AI era
What I took from a couple of great podcast episodes I listened to this morning.
I'm walking in the cool mornings at the moment, as the problem with my right knee is preventing me from running right now, which is driving me bonkers.
View from the narrowboat stern this morning just before I set off on the walk.
On the walk this morning, I listened to a couple of episodes from two great podcasts I'm subscribed to - Hansleminutes and Soft Skills Engineering.
Knowledge engineering and lifecycle management
In Stack Overflow for the Agent Era - with VP of Product Alex Lato, Scott Hanselman talks to Alex Lato about how Stack Overflow is evolving, driven by, and perhaps driven towards, the agent substrate. It's a fascinating conversation between two experienced folks, and well worth a complete listen. What I took from this conversation is that we may see a new knowledge-related discipline emerging, or at least a stronger focus in that direction.
Scott and Alex talked a lot about knowledge provenance, reliability, attribution and ranking, which made me wonder about what knowledge engineering, perhaps knowledge lifecycle management, might look like today and tomorrow. This knowledge, and how agents source, relay, condense, combine and share it, is originally from the hard work of folks on Stack Overflow and in other communities sharing what they know, but how will that evolve when the layers of reuse coalesce over time?
One other fascinating aspect that Alex shared, and Scott picked up, is that in Stack Overflow's new venture here, agents, and their activities, are ultimately and strongly tied to human "owners", with the provenance - but more importantly reputation - that is part of that association.
Netiquette and how our connections are changing
In Soft Skills Engineering's Episode 520, hosts Dave Smith and Jamison Dance are entertaining and fun to listen to as usual, and the word "netiquette" is brought up in the context of what one should and should not do in today's era of AI assisted work.
Netiquette was originally an umbrella term for how to behave in the brave new world of Internet-based communication - for example how and when to use the To:, Cc: and Bcc: in email correspondence (on which I have thoughts too), when to reply, and how formal, or not, one should be, in various situations. That concept of "how to behave" surfaces in this conversation again where Dave and Jamison talk about their (and others') experiences with folks copy-pasting wads of generative AI output to each other, sometimes without even reading it themselves.
Following that train of thought, they reach a conclusion that is not an entirely pleasant one, that the LLM facilities we have at our fingertips today is causing the death of the human connection, a connection that originally evolved (in our tech workplaces) almost as a by-product of collaborating on design and code, to get it right. When we have LLMs do a lot of that for us, where's the context in which we maintain that loose but essential human connection - the shared jokes, the gently snarky but well-meaning asides?
If you're not subscribed to these podcasts, I recommend you remedy that today!