In my day-to-day work with technology, I have found there is No Silver Bullet [ucsf.edu] to the essential difficulties of software development. Essential best practices are situational and defined by context.
How I made AI Search “Whatever data you want to see…” for Find Me in Chicago. Building Text-to-SoQL was a journey in pragmatic AI especially around the CHAD challenges: managing token Cost through minimal architectures suppressing Hallucination with strict schema and dialect grounding converting human Ambiguity into precise intent taming hardware non-Determinism through regex normalization […]
How I made AI Search “Whatever the data you want to see…” for Find Me in Chicago. I started my Text-to-SoQL journey with a naive misconception that cranking down these settings would make my queries mostly deterministic: temperature: 0 – sharpen the LLM to always choose the highest probability token topK: 1 – forces the […]
How I made AI Search “Whatever data you want to see…” for Find Me in Chicago. If a user asks to see the “worst crashes,” they are using a word that means different things to different people. Does “worst” mean the crashes with the most fatalities, the most injuries, or the ones that happened at […]
How I made AI Search “Whatever data you want to see…” for Find Me in Chicago. Human language is built on ambiguity. Ambiguity is not a bug to be fixed in natural language; it is an essential feature of human communication. As Ludwig Wittgenstein observed in his Philosophical Investigations (S43), “the meaning of a word […]
How I made AI Search “Whatever data you want to see…” for Find Me in Chicago. LLMs are trained on billions of lines of SQL. SoQL looks like SQL but differs in critical ways: No `CASE`/`WHEN` keywords, although SoQL does support a case() function No subqueries No `JOIN` supported for the public endpoint being used […]
How I made AI Search “Whatever data you want to see…” for Find Me in Chicago. Everyone knows LLMs can confidently hallucinate and then often refuse to admit the hallucination unless prompted with clear evidence. So it is important to use schema grounding to give AI any chance to succeed at Text-to-SoQL. There are different […]
How I made AI Search “Whatever data you want to see…” for Find Me in Chicago. If you try to run “zero-shot” Text-to-Sql against a raw enterprise data warehouse with hundreds of tables and complex foreign key chains, off-the-shelf models fail spectacularly. Feeding hundreds of tables into a prompt pollutes the attention window and causes […]
How I made AI Search “Whatever data you want to see…” for Find Me in Chicago. In any engineering project cost is an important constraint. Arguably it is the most important constraint and one thing we know about AI inference is it can be expensive. AI requires a lot of compute, high tech manufacturing, water, […]
How I made AI Search “Whatever data you want to see…” for Find Me in Chicago. The Chicago Data Portal provides a wealth of information, but its user interface has never been inviting for non-technical citizens to discover and explore. Find Me in Chicago is an independent civic project to make public data more accessible. […]
Find Me in Chicago is an independent civic project built to make public data from the City of Chicago more accessible. Originally launched in 2016 using JQuery and Google Maps JavaScript API the application has been modernized and rewritten using React. Google Maps is now brokered through React Google Maps and there is new support […]
What a difference a year makes. When I wrote AI Is The New Rubber Duck (Force Multiplier) last April, AI really was a rubber duck. At least for the low-grade AI I had access to on a minimal budget with no corporate or venture capital sponsorship. It was helpful, but it couldn’t usefully write much […]
Though this art of artificial intelligence arose long after my time, its nature is familiar. No craft emerges from nothing. AI is shaped by centuries of reason—by the logic we devised, the mathematics refined, the natural laws discovered. Its pattern-seeking mirrors our induction, its reasoning, our syllogism. Though AI lacks the soul’s intellect, it reflects […]