Standing up Kyndryl’s Apps, Data, and AI practice as well as managing Cloud has been a lot of very rewarding work. So much so, that I haven’t had time to keep up with my hobby software development project, Leave the House Out of It (LTHOI.com). For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a little app that I use to run a pick’em fantasy football league with my friends. More importantly it gives me (who is not nearly the developer he once was) a chance to play with new technologies without depriving my clients of the significantly more talented developers who are on my team! After years of neglect, there was a desperate need for several key updates:
- The way I have worked with LTHOI, it had become a very unruly project. There were still remnants of an old Jenkins pipeline, one lambda service that I no longer use, a deploy step in the pipeline that was no longer necessary, and other little technical debt issues. This made the code repository difficult to follow.
- I had come up with, but never had a chance to implement, a way to simplify the scoring system in order to reduce the code complexity, the processing time required, AND my AWS bill.
- The frontend was built on Angular 6, a full 12 versions behind the LTS version. This finally came to bite me when Google changed the way they implemented OAuth and none of the plugins that I had leveraged when I initially built the UI 8 years ago were still working. I needed to upgrade, but I HATE UI development. My total lack of aesthetic sensibilities has led me to avoid learning front end tech for my entire career.
Fortunately for me, these fixes were an excellent excuse to play with some of the same tech that my team is using to make software development better, faster, and cheaper at Kyndryl… GenAI development tools. Obviously at Kyndryl our developers have access to a host of agents and MCP server tools that I don’t have permission to use on my personal site (LTHOI is not a Kyndryl client!). That said, I installed GitHub Copilot in VSCode along with Claude Code and AWS’ Q and set about addressing the three items above.
I plan on writing a series of blog posts over the coming days and weeks to describe my experience and share how it will impact the IT industry… but for hobby projects the answer is simple. Vibe coding is SOOOO rad! I eliminated thousands of lines of code, implemented changes that should save me upwards of $50 on my AWS bill over the season (I don’t have many users, so that’s actually a very substantial portion of my bill), and ensured that the code should work for many years to come without working for more than about 20 hours! This allows me to focus on what I enjoy, imagining cool features and watching them get built instead of googling and trying to implement new frameworks.
Needless to say what works for my hobby projects and what works for my clients are different things. My hobby projects collect very little personal data. No one is going to lose their job if they get hacked or go down. Certainly there aren’t doctors depending on them in the ER or financial transactions that depend on them. How we apply these tools to enterprise IT is going to be different. Over the next couple of weeks I’m planning a series of blog posts on how my experiences have informed the way I view the use of Coding Assistants to help our clients. Here’s what I’ll be writing about for the next couple weeks.
Things that make Coding Assistants powerful in Enterprise IT:
- Vibe Coding Reflections: Why Learn Something When Your Intern Has Read the Internet?
- Vibe Coding Reflections: Pair Programming Without Having To Deal With People
Limitations for Coding Assistants in Enterprise IT:
- Vibe Coding Reflections: Really Knowledgeable, but Sort of Still an Intern
- Vibe Coding Reflections: Legacy Code Is Still Hard to Figure Out
- Vibe Coding Reflections: Trapped in My IDE
How I Expect This Will Change The Future of Enterprise IT::