If you read my post on asking tiny questions, you're already familiar with how structured output turns LLMs into pretty reliable data processors. We saw how requesting boolean responses or specific JSON formats made local LLMs actually useful for automation tasks. In this article, we're taking that same structured …

For the longest time, I thought AI would never apply to me as a developer. I don't excel at math, and AI is pretty much all math. But then I realized that I don't need to understand the math to use AI effectively - there's plenty of applied intelligence that's directly relevant to what I do every day with PowerShell. …

This is the first installment in a series of posts that show actually useful use-cases for AI in automation. Most of the content will revolve around "structured output," which is basically JSON-formatted AI output. You'll learn more about structured output in-depth later on, but in this post, I wanted to give …

Recently, I was trying to figure out if the content of two headlines overlapped. I needed a script that would answer if Pacific Palisades is part of Los Angeles, but I couldn't use regex because there's no pattern that matches "Pacific Palisades is part of Los Angeles." There's also no simple string …

If you're like me and have a hard time wrapping your mind around how AI works, Microsoft's AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code makes it unusually approachable. Recent versions work on Windows, Linux AND macOS too! I didn't expect LLM engines to be "just" binary files, but the VS Code extension helped me better …

People talk a lot about AI slop but what about anti-AI slop? My friend's kid at uni is going to school for AI, yet is required to score nearly 0% on those fraudulent AI-detection services. To pass, he had to rewrite an authentic, well-written paper to say: "We get good help, more happy people, and less money …

I'm currently working on the final chapter of our book! It's the DevOps chapter, which for a while, I thought would probably be about LLMOps or GenAIOps. But I haven't found a way to apply those to me as a DevOps person. After reading Chapter 2 which covers Code Assistants, my coauthor and BFF Brandon suggested we show …

Incredible! I just used PowerShell and OpenAI to import text from a PDF right into SQL Server 🚀 AI's usefulness is often debated but this is such a great use-case. I also see it being useful for automatically adding SharePoint document metadata and cleaning dirty data. Using a new feature from OpenAI called …

I don't know if you can tell but I'm having a ton of fun lately with AI. I prefer AI coding over manual coding because I can skip all the tedium and just communicate in my first language. Advanced things too, in languages I don't know well like TypeScript. I remember seeing a YouTube headline about a guy who built a …

Since I can't find it anywhere else on the web, here's how you detect ARM64 xplat. 1# Determine OS and Architecture 2$osPlatform = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation]::OSDescription 3$architecture = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation]::OSArchitecture 4 5# Adjust the platform and …