One thing I've noticed bridging the gap between technical LLM users like myself, and less technical users is they don't know the right questions to ask so to speak. I'm not sure how many wordpress users are going to jump in and ask an LLM to "adjust my header to make it sticky and reduce the background opacity on the hero image by 5%". Do you find it a challenge getting users the right directional support to ask the right questions?
Yeah totally, we see the same thing. Most people don't phrase things the way an engineer would but funny enough, LLMs are often better than us at interpreting non technical instructions. What makes a big difference is giving the model context about what the user is actually looking at (current page, selected section, etc.), so it doesn’t have to guess. That way has a decent chance of doing the right thing.
I think that's the best part of what we've built--while you still can use an LLM to do that. You can also just use the drag and drop editor to figure it out and make that change without spending AI credits to do so. You also can just edit the code directly and make the change too in our editor.
This is a writeup I put together documenting how we (Snowpack Data) cut ETL costs by over 99% at Grid, and achieved an overall 80% reduction in BigQuery spend. Our blog documents the approach to the problems that arose in the ETL and provides an approachable deep dive into our implementation. The goal is to discuss the technical challenges without diving too deep into code examples, although we'd love to provide more technical commentary if anyone wants it!
Earlier this year I began a small boutique consulting company with the goal of leveraging my broad analytical experience with two dynamic partners to tackle challenges that growing businesses inevitably see in the analytics stack. The three of us had previously spent time at other startups, and most recently at Flexport, where we had realized the challenges that occur when short-term thinking in analytical foundations meet the realities of rapidly scaling businesses. We'll aim to continue to share our learnings and collaborate with others in the space as we continue to tackle these types of problems!
