There is a “Law of the Instrument” also known as the “Golden Hammer”, “Law of the Hammer”, and “Maslow’s Hammer”… there are several variations of it such as:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Give a boy a hammer and chisel; show him how to use them; at once he begins to hack the doorposts, to take off the corners of shutter and window frames, until you teach him a better use for them, and how to keep his activity within bounds.
The Law of the Instrument is a cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on a familiar tool.
Why, you may ask, do I bring this up? well… we all have our favorite “Hammer”, and we tend to use it in the software industry. Yours might be a BPM, The Smart Client, or Dashboards, or Crystal Reports… Lately everyone is talking about AI. Will AI become the next popular hammer?"
I myself and totally guilty of this in the past with BPMs… Tell me about a problem, and the answer was “create a BPM”. Are you guilty of “hacking at the doorposts” because someone taught you about a tool, but not the proper use of it? Let’s remember to use ALL the tools in our toolbox, not just the first one you pick up. ALSO, it might be time to look in your toolbox to see if there are any new tools that someone (Epicor) has added to your toolbox.
Kinetic’s Application Studio has grown with more and more features, some of which take it well beyond the former capabilities of years gone by. It might be time to reexamine the new tools that Epicor has been desigining and using to build Kinetic.
totally agree tim, and you need to take the time to learn how to use these new tools! New tools require new skills. And while the hammer is more or less the same for the past 1000 years, that doesn’t count for all the tools.
I have been here THREE times… the Hammer Museum in Haines Alaska has a collection of 2500 different hammers. each hammer was designed for a slightly different use. Some for pounding nails (the obvious), but others for removing, destroying, tapping, playing musical instruments, removing teeth. Many are for specific trades… shoe making, Jewelery making, Medical, Automotive, etc. It is fascinating to see how “one tool” called a “Hammer” can come in so many itterations.
If you ever find yourself in Haines Alaska (typically on an Alaska Cruise of some kind), make sure that you spend the big $7 to visit the Hammer Museum.
Counterargument: sticking to a defined set of well-tested design patterns makes life easier in a lot of ways. This is especially crucial in smaller organizations where everyone must wear many hats and if the primary on a project is unavailable, the backup can grasp what’s going on quickly.
It already is because it’s lets you cut corners. Cutting corners is always popular. It’s just not a hammer for this business because ERP transactions and processes are highly ordered and deterministic. It’s a poor fit for ML which is inherently stochastic and inferential.
Having said that, Stable Diffusion and the coding assistants are cool. Training your own models is interesting as well. Just don’t use them for anything where “kinda close” doesn’t cut it.
When you are in Haines Alaska because the Cruise Ship drops you there for the day, you have about 5 things to see… Hammer Museum, three clothing stores, and a grocery store… guess I insisted on going somewhere “fun” for me too.
On the fly translation of both training and comment fields when?
Half kidding. I don’t need that, but it seems like something the tech should be able to do fairly well.
Seriously though, on-prem when? Apple just dropped a LLM that should run locally on iPads…
Those same users complain when everything is disorganized mess or when the one guy that understood the so-called system they use leaves the company. Not sure if anyone else has had the “can AI solve our mess?” meetings where the conclusion is if you can’t sort your stuff out accurately, why would you assume a glorified regression model can?
no, it was a typical small town grocery store… but when we were in the store back in 2012, we met Gold Rush TV shows Grandpa John Schnabel (grandfather of Parker). He was a very nice man and allowed my daughters to take photos with him. John lived in Haines Alaska, so he shopped at the small store. Imagine having daily cruise ships land in your small town of 1700 people… population tripled every day. hahah
hahah… didn’t see your comment before…
well, we did nail it the first time we went. It was in August of 1999, about 5 days before I started at Epicor, we were on a cruise between jobs with some friends. The most relaxing vacation I ever took because I was “unemployed” but I wasn’t worried because I had a job waiting when I returned. I had just left my other job a couple of weeks before, then we took the cruise, and we got home on the 9th, and I started work on August 10th, 1999… coming up on my 25th-anniversary date! Second time, we were cruising with our adult daughters, and of course, we needed to show them the sites on the cruise.
The third time was 2017 when we took my wife’s Parents on the same cruise. My father-in-law loves tools, so of course, we had to go to the Hammer Museum again.
