I wanted to write for a living as soon as I learned that books don’t spring fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus but in fact are written by regular people. Hey, I was a regular people!

Not too long after that realization, I discovered the Apple II—and developed a second obsession, this one over a technology that was changing the world.

I once intended to go into programming as a career. But I stumbled into a job that let me scratch both my writing and programming itches. I’ve been a technical writer ever since.

The arrival of large language models (LLMs) felt like a technological New Testament, a new era with new rules, but no less transformative than the personal computer revolution. The two things I loved and understood best, software and language, had formed a new, more intimate relationship. I’d used words to write about code; now code could itself read and write.

Cool! … Cool?

I’ve spent years documenting AI and ML features at Snowflake and Azure Cognitive Services, sitting close enough to see how the sausage is made, but far enough back to still find it tasty. Over those years, I’ve learned enough about LLMs to have developed opinions about them.

Lately, I’ve been having thoughts about AI that don’t belong in documentation. The Inference is a place for those thoughts to go. I’ll try to be technically honest, intellectually curious, and mercifully brief. But no promises on that last one.

Let me answer the obvious question up front: yes, I’m working with a large language model to create this blog. I’ll write more about that experience as it develops.

So pull up a comfy chair, sit down, settle in. Invite a Glen of Imaal Terrier onto your lap. And welcome to The Inference.