Exploring AI Tools and their Applications

The learning never really stops does it. I’m actually enjoying having a go at different tools at the moment, and trying to make it all make sense in my head.

Strategically, I want to be able to articulate how AI can support those in quality engineering, particularly around test automation.

Here are a few things I’ve been having a play with this week:-

1. Anthropic’s Claude Computer use – I went back to my original experiments with the calculator documented here https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7259308192675864577-F_CK?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop and expanded them to try and learn more about this beta feature. Having not really used Docker on my own machine before (I know!), getting this working via Docker desktop was a lot more straightforward than I thought it’d be.

2. Github Copilot. I’m really trying to think strategically about the use of this. How to best use this powerful extension to pragmatically augment existing test automation frameworks in a way that doesn’t remove the human from the loop.
3. Open AI’s ChatGPT. It sounds odd, but I hate having to turn off cookies on every site I go on. ChatGPT provides answers without this extra layer of faff (having already done it once). I’ve recently found it useful for brainstorming, summarising, asking random questions, clarification and debugging e.g. when I use cmd line to run this docker startup command I get errors. why? Oooh its because I need to use GitBash because that command is a unix command and doesn’t work natively on windows – thanks!
4. I was sent my physical copy of Software Testing with Gen AI by Mark Winteringham this week. I reviewed this book – and I mean really reviewed it – think buying API tokens to check the prompts actually work, setting up RAG, the works! Here’s a vid of me opening the book, along with my cat, who instantly claims the packaging for their own. I was happy to get the chance to do this though, because the book is a solid reference point that I know I’ll be returning to as I start to become more serious in my AI learning journey
5. Inspired by Gabrielle Earnshaw’s recent vid, I explored napkin.ai. I used it to add a visual to an earlier blog post. I’m really glad Gabby made a video, because initially I went to chatGPT and searched for the napkin.ai agent on mobile – but this wasn’t what I was really looking for. After following her vid I signed up to the napkin.ai beta and accessed on desktop which was where the magic could happen. The result is the pdf you see in this blog post. I know this is going to be an absolute timesaver for me, because this kind of thing sounds easy then actually takes hours to put together.
6. Learning – this was a few weeks back, but I decided to do the free Google AI for Educators certificate. I’d love to be able to train folks about AI eventually, so its interesting to see how Google tackle giving educators the information they need.