Where’s the Food?
I first unveiled this real-life story while kicking off my talk, “Meta Programming — Code Generation with Kotlin Poet,” at this year’s Code Talks conference. Since I’ve been retelling this tale in various discussions, I thought it’s high time to share it with a broader audience. So, gather around, grab a cup of coffee, and let’s dive in…
Earlier this year, at Holisticon, we hosted Girls and Boys Day. If you’re not familiar, this is an event in Hamburg where seventh graders visit their families, friends, and relatives at their workplaces to observe how adults spend their day and gain insights into the world of work. Given our expertise in process automation and natural language processing at Holisticon, we assigned them the task of implementing a process, or more precisely, this process:
So, here’s basically how this BPMN process works:
- you send an email informing us that you’re expecting three guests for dinner (e.g.: one is vegetarian, one doesn’t consume alcohol, and one prefers chicken)
- Chat GPT then analyses your request, suggests a meal, provides a recipe, and even generates a grocery list for the items you need to shop.
- The kids also explored letting GPT translate this into French or Spanish …
While this is essentially a fun project, the underlying technology is astonishing. You can find more information about it here.
The kids spent a few hours implementing this process, and it worked seamlessly. They could send an email and receive a response from Chat GPT, instructing them on what to cook, how to prepare it, and what to shop for.
We were all thrilled, and the kids were rightfully proud.
We were impressed: “Wow, this is incredible. What an exciting time to be alive!”
However, once I returned home, I couldn’t shake the thought: “Wait a minute — a bunch of 12-year-olds just constructed a functioning process application that serves its intended purpose, deployed it to the cloud, and executed it.
This is what I do for a living! If children can achieve this today, what will happen in another week or year? My managers and clients might acquire this skill, and I’ll find myself unemployed and starving.”
So, that night, I went to bed feeling frustrated and anxious. Yet, when I awoke the next day, a different concern struck me:
Wait a minute — I didn’t see any food.
We were all impressed by the shiny emails, recipes, and shopping lists, but the crucial question remained:
- Is the food tasty?
- Does it provide enough for three people?
- Can we cook the meal with the items on the grocery list?
- If I were to build a business around this concept, how many customers might I lose every month due to dissatisfaction with my service?
I wholeheartedly agree that we must reduce manual coding. Charging three-digit hourly rates for tasks that any child could copy and paste from a chat page is no longer sustainable. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; many of the boring, error-prone tasks we currently perform every day should be automated. (Yes, Liquibase, I’m talking to you!)
Nonetheless, it’s our responsibility to ensure that the entire software generation process becomes deterministic, reproducible, and scalable.
That’s where I left off in September. During my conference talk, I emphasized the importance of controlling the generative process, preferably by writing the generators ourselves (you can watch the video for more).
What now?
Let me break it down in simpler terms: We’re entering a world where 2 plus 2 might not always equal 4 anymore.
The result may vary depending on what the customer wants, what they are willing to pay, and how we design the system. It also could be any value between 3.8 or 4.2.
We need to determine if this tolerance is acceptable, establish mechanisms to guarantee it never falls below 3.7, and empower our customers to make the necessary decisions.
This will not make us lose our jobs … this will lead to more work, more meaningful work and thus more fun.
So we were right: What an exciting time to be alive!
