Practical AI adoption

Vuja De'

The feeling that we have never been here before.

There's a term I've always liked:

Vuja de. The feeling that we have never been here before.

Or...have we?

Because this should feel familiar to engineers.

I shared a simple framework recently for thinking about how AI fits into a business.

The more I looked at it, the more it felt familiar.

Because it is.

This is not really an AI framework.

It is just structured problem solving.

The same kind engineers use every day.

1. Clarify the Goal

  • Define the problem
  • Not "use a tool"
  • Not "try something new"

A real problem.

2. Define the Story

  • Understand the system
  • Inputs. Dependencies. Users. Edge cases.

3. Identify Constraints

  • Know the limits
  • Performance. Scale. Time. Resources.

4. Ask Better Questions

  • Iterate
  • Test. Refine. Adjust.
  • Iterate again

5. Choose the Tools

  • Now pick the stack
  • And just as importantly, what not to use

Remember when we warned young software engineers not to start coding right away?

When engineers start with tools, we call it premature optimization.

With AI, we are seeing a lot of the same pattern play out in a different form.

The Story-to-Strategy Framework works because it is not new.

It just feels new because the tool is new.

The gap is not AI capability.

It is how consistently we apply this kind of thinking.