Pierre-Yves Gillier

Despite all my claims, I can say I'm correctly using Generative AI tools for a few weeks only. I've been tinkering with it really since last september, especially for administrative stuff and automating my workflows. Nothing special as we have many MCP servers internally, which should cover all our use-cases, twice…

However, while efficient on non-code items, I was still struggling when dealing with Kiro or Claude Code. My projects were bloated, agents were unable to complete actions and moreover, I was spending in electricity the equivalent of a rural town monthly usage for nothing.

It completely changed a few weeks ago when, for a specific need, I found the urge to fork and rewrite an old project from a former colleague to fit my needs. And because I still dislike go, I asked Kiro to rewrite it in Rust, partly to learn the language with real code. This time, I was clear, I had a good direction (ok, rewriting an existing project) and I had prepared the project with small but useful steering files.

And voilà, after a couple of minutes, I was able to launch the binary and use it. Building on top of it, I was able to add features without having my laptop melt from burned tokens...

First epiphany!

The second one was about speaking, not in french, but in english. Even with over 3 years working for Amazon, I felt I needed to level up both my pronunciation and ease in public settings.

In France, when working, you're also thesaurising cash, through your employer, for training outside of work topics. Some people choose handcraft of event drivin license, it's allowed, but language lessons are also available. It means you only have to pay a small fee, 100€, for a course which could cost up to 3000€, great.

I found an school nearby and began lesons with a dedicated teacher, in a 1:1 layout. While remote option was available, I decided to go the in-person way because I thought it would be better for her to correct me, and myself to be completely focused on the lesseon.

While the lessons were nice and useful, I know how to say "idea" now, I was not able to stress them in real-life, face to face, situations. Until last January. long story short, I was part of a workshop held in London with europeans colleagues, with a final presentation for our leadership. It meant I had to be both efficient in leading workshop meetings with my colleagues, none speaking french, and also in prepping myself for the final presentation.

To be honest, I did not slept well the last night as I was rehearsing until late. However, when I had to take the stage to showcase our work, it was a blast: I was understandable, without hesitating too much; my colleagues' ears were not bleeding from my accents and mistakes. And, at the end, i was told it was a good presentation.

Second epiphany.

This is not a mystery, the grand era of personal blogging is over and many ones are still struggling to write content, be it for personal thoughts or professional ones.

This place is a good example and, despite good intentions, I'm still to find a good mechanism to publish what's in my mind. On a professional aspect, it is worse as I'm required to write content, technical workshops, articles and even "one-pagers".

However, sometimes, an angel is peering over your shoulder and you manage to write not one but two articles in a month!¹

SO, interested in Generative AI and/or cybersecurity? Got you covered!

• Building an AI TRiSM posture using AWS Solutions: while still in the early days, Generative AI security is already structuring with several frameworks, such as TRiSM.
• Security checks using Amazon Q Developer CLI: I'm always typing instead of using my mouse. It was then necessary for me to speak on how you can use Amazon Q Developer CLI to analyze and manage your AWS resources from a security perspective. it was fun to try many examples over my own AWS accounts and discover horrible things I left lurking in the shadows…

Over for this week/month/quarter. Hopefully another content before Christmas!

For a few weeks, I participated in an internal hackathon where the main guideline was to exclusively use our own coding agent in its CLI¹ flavor.

As I had a project idea, among many in my backlog, I happily spent too much time building and, let be honest, talking to the agent. The first days were rough as I needed to understand how to communicate with the agent, had a lot of back-and-forth on details and, eventually, asked it to destroy project to restart from scratch…

Like many, I read the articles over the internet about the rise of coding agents and how it will reshape the development ecosystem, especially for junior developers. While I agree with the general opinion, I'm not convinced it will mark the end of developement as we know it, with it peculiar population.

For my hackathon, I asked the agent to build a Next.js stack with the Mantine framework. The agent wrote fully functional code in less time it would have taken me to simply display the default page of a Next.js project. That's great for hackathons, that's great for side-projects and small reach ones. But it's not for production targets. It's not intelligent for me to manage a project where I don't have enough experience and knowledge to maintain at least half of the code².

There are stories about "projects" written in a weekend using coding agents and being a total shitshow when deployed to production because:

1. Agents are here to write code, not optimize or secure it. So, imho, deploying projects as-is is a kind of russian roulette.
2. The humans behind the projects were not savvy enough to understand the inner mechanics.

All these signals make me think junior developars will still be needed, even in the Generative AI age. They will have to specialize far sooner than ever, be it in a technical field like mastering a specific framework or business one such as legal or finance. Why ? Because agents, utlimately, are statistical models and are not as efficient as human beings when having to deal with future problems suc as production deployments and relating technical problems with functional ones.

This transition won't be easy, unfortunately. Consulting companies will need to shift their learning and staffing process to hire and train more specialized people: leading to layoffs for those unable to step into this new paradigm. But no, coding agents won't replace humans in all tech domains. They will accelerate the delivery of projects by taking care of the structural work, the boilerplate. But humans will still be in the loop to put the cherry on the top.

When you're a technical guy at AWS, you need to be part of a TFC where you specialize in a domain. For me, it was the cybersecurity vertical which had my attention so I joined the community.

And, in 2023, I had the opportunity to work with several startups building LLMs, almost the prehistory there, and help them use our resources; SageMaker was quite low of features and Bedrock only a dream. Then, I grew a reputation of an "expert" in this field, while not knowing the difference between supervised learning and unsupervised one.

Despite working for the vast majority of last year on another vertical, I was often part of discussions on Generative AI and, due to my TFC, asked on related security topics. I began to dig on topics like "Responsible AI" and model ethics.

Coincidently, I spent time to certify myself both on AWS solutions and AIML fundamentals. These new knowledges were pivotal to my decision to explore further the intersection of both domains. "GenAI applied to Cybersecurity" and "Security of GenAI" are areas still vastly unexplored and a terra incognita I want to explore.

I do have several assets under review/building and hope I'll publish them before holidays.

When I started this iteration of my blog, more than a decade ago, my idea was to improve my writing by setting up a publishing cadence, starting at two posts per week, with both technical and non-technical content. It would have also helped me build a legitimacy in my fieldn which is never a bad thing.

I failed.

I failed because I was too obsessed with the quality, writing style and overall too perfectionist. It led to a lot more posts in draft status than published¹.

From a technical point of view, this blog is almost up-to-date on all dependencies and libraries. Why ? I took, and still do, each opportunity to dive deep in technical stuff instead of writing. I've event gone lengths to try a fully new distro…

I am not writing for a living, luckily, but this is a skill I need to improve. My company praises writing above everything else² and it is becoming mandatory for me to become a good writer as I'm looking to advance in my career here.

As writing is a skill, I need to train. This blog will, once again and for good hopefully, become a playground. Code, half-baked content, rants & so on. "Release early, release often" is a motto I gave to all my mentees; it's time to apply it to myself.

Edit: During the writing of this article, I had three times where I was digressing. It took a conscious decision to go back to writing.

Derrière ce titre un peu provocateur, je vous parle ce jour d'un nouvel outil découvert lors d'une review Guardian¹ et qui m'a conquis tout de suite: Taskfile.dev.

Ce petit binaire en go a pour ambition de remplacer les vénérables Makefile. Simplement le fait que les commandes soient décrites en yaml, que cela utilise le templating Go sont autant de raisons qui m'ont fait basculer mes principaux repositories sur cette solution.

L'essayer sera certainement l'adopter.

Dans les principes de leadership qui gouvernent toutes nos actions et que je tente encore et toujours de m'approprier, il y en a un que, tel monsieur Jourdain, je cultivais avant sans le savoir et que je sais avoir perdu de vue depuis un certain temps : "Learn and be curious"

Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.

Je peux facilement dater le début de cet abandon. Le contexte de l'époque¹ et la pression politique associée m'ont obligé à délaisser ma passion pour la technique pour des considérations plus prosaïques, la réunionnite, et plus en rapport avec mes besoins à court terme.

Arriver chez AWS m'a redonné de la bande et du temps. Et, grâce à cela, j'ai pu mesurer l'étendue de mon retard...

Il est donc nécessaire de repartir sur de bonnes bases mais je dois rester concentré sur quelques sujets et ne pas me disperser. Vous n'imaginez pas la quantité de sujets shiny qui attendent d'être traités...

Voici donc une liste, non exhaustive, de sujets que je veux creuser :

• La sécurité informatique, avec un focus sur la sécurité des infrastructures.
• L'observabilité, en particulier les métriques DORA.
• Le self-hosting.
• Developer eXperience, le cloud est encore difficile d'accès quand il n'y pas de devops dans le coin
• Le MLOps en général
• en rapport avec l'item précédent, les containers et leur usage (j'ai récemment découvert les devcontainers par exemple)
• Python
• Rust
• ...

Et avec ces contraintes pour ne pas me disperser :

1. Deux sujets au maximum en parallèle
2. Un projet POC quand c'est possible (je ne me vois pas entraîner un LLM pour le moment...)
3. Documenter via un article sur ce blog. Cela sera certainement de la redite de ressources existantes mais j'aurai la satisfaction d'avoir fixé des infos au moins dans ma tête
4. Rester cohérent avec la fameuse work-life balance.

Je ne me mets pas de timeline à dessein. La machine est rouillée et je dois la relancer.