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Some of the hardest work in retail analytics happens long before dashboards, forecasts, or machine learning models.

It begins with a much less glamorous challenge: making sure “the same product” is actually the same product across systems.

In a typical supermarket, there were 31,795 items on the shelf on average in 2024¹. Across suppliers, distributors, and point-of-sale systems, the data behind those items is often fragmented, inconsistent, and noisy. GS1 reports that retailers may need 10–15 interactions with suppliers to launch each SKU, and that they face ~15,000 issues with inaccurate product data per year on average.²

I. Introduction: The AI Honeymoon

If you’re in tech, you’ve felt the magic. As a regular user of {vibecoding} and other AI-assisted tools, I’ve seen it firsthand: boilerplate code vanishes in seconds, complex functions appear faster than I could have typed them, and my overall workflow is genuinely accelerated. It feels like a superpower, a quantum leap in productivity.

But there’s a catch. I find that it accelerates my development… however, I say that with the context of more than 20 years of programming experience. And that experience, I’ve learned, is more critical than ever.

Image courtesy of Google Gemini

This is the third article in my AI Code-Off experiments series. You can read the first article and second article for context.

Line 184. That’s where the Quick Start section lived in our project README.

Think about that for a moment. A new developer lands on your project, excited to try it out, and has to scroll through 183 lines of architectural philosophy, memory bank explanations, and universal design principles before learning the single most important thing: how to actually use it.

Image courtesy of Google Gemini

This blog is a continuation of my AI Code-Off experiments series. You can read the first article here: I Pitted Gemini, Claude, and GPT in a 4-Stage AI ‘Code-Off.’

1,717 lines. That’s how long my Streamlit UI rule, intended as a guide for LLMs and Agents, had grown.

This wasn’t documentation for humans—it was a rule file for AI coding assistants in Cursor. When you ask an AI to build a Streamlit dashboard, it consults files like this to understand best practices and requirements. But somewhere in those 1,717 lines, the guidance had become contradictory. Plotly or PyDeck for visualizations? The rule said both, with no clear preference. Duplicate sections appeared throughout. Critical production guidance (performance, accessibility, deployment) was completely missing.

Image courtesy of Google Gemini

With over two decades of self-taught programming experience, I’ve seen AI revolutionize my coding over the last ten months. Daily use of LLMs has dramatically sped up projects, from quick prototyping and boilerplate generation to faster debugging. This frees me to focus on architectural decisions and complex problem-solving. However, effective AI use demands a strong grasp of programming fundamentals. LLMs aren’t perfect, and my experience has been crucial in quickly spotting and fixing bugs and logical flaws in AI-generated code.

Blog Hosting Platform

I’ve been working on my blog workflow recently. I’ve have used Ghost as my blogging platform for a few years. At $5 per month, it is hard to beat the value of the service. However, my needs are fairly simple when it comes to blogging, so I wanted to get back to the basics. I decided to switch to a static site generator because I’m simply not using any of the advanced features of Ghost.

TL;DR

The curse of knowledge happens far more than we realize. Effective communication is not just about conveying information but also about ensuring that your message is well-received and understood. By working to establish a shared understanding, a common context, and a consistent frame of reference, we can avoid confusion and foster a deeper connection with our audience. Let’s strive to communicate effectively and make a positive impact in our interactions with others.

TL;DR

This post is a bit about my background and what I envision for my blog going forward. I need to update my blog more frequently. An 8-year gap between posts is really long!

It’s been a while since my last post

I am updating my blog, one more time. I failed to achieve my objective in my previous blog post, Being More Active, which I wrote in 2016. That blog post was written three years after my last blog post in 2013. I suppose if we were to look at the posting gaps from a breaking personal records perspective, going from a three-year writing gap to an eight-year gap might be quite the record. I really should do better.

It would seem that I’ve allowed this blog to become inactive. It’s been three years since my last post. To be honest, I was never much of a blogger so I’m not surprised this site has languished.

Going forward, I plan to write more frequently and expand the content to include more technology-related posts, particularly tutorials. As a Solutions Engineer at Hortonworks, I find plenty of opportunities to generate useful content based on my daily work.

I had an opportunity to take a short trip to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia.  I’ve always wanted to go, and this was my first trip.  Regarding theme parks, they weren’t very different from Kings Dominion or Hershey Park.  My family and I had a good time.

One of the attractions that most interested me was the Animal Ambassadors.  I’m not aware of other theme parks offering something similar.  They have an up-close tour, during which you pay to get behind-the-scenes exposure to the animals.  I was most excited about the Wolf tour, but my timing was horrible, and I missed it.  I was able to see some other very cool animals you don’t see every day.  Naturally, I went with a camera in hand!