What My Team Is Thankful for in AI and AWS This Thanksgiving

Dr. Ryan Ries here. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I asked my team what they’re grateful for in the world of AI and AWS.

Personally, I’m thankful for Claude Code connected to Bedrock, and how nice it is to be able to generate code. I’m also thankful for Kiro, helping me vibe code a quick demo! Last but not least, I’m grateful to our customers for entrusting us to solve their biggest problems with AI.

The Speed Demons

Chris C. kicked things off: "I am thankful for genAI to help me develop training and pre-sales approaches that would have taken me 2 or 3 weeks 5 years ago."

Na Y. threw in her gratitude for genAI helping with document writing, solution design, code development, and polishing emails. She added: "And one important skill is to provide needed context and ask good questions."

She's absolutely right. Garbage prompts get garbage results. AI can't read your mind (yet).

The Wholesome Moment

Max G. gave us a sentimental moment: "I am grateful to be working with a team of extremely talented technologists."

And Chris C. doubled down on this: "I 2nd that. I have been at 12 companies, and this one is the best."

Guys, you're making me emotional. Stop it.

Imran O. managed to thread the needle: "I am grateful for the team I work with, and the technologies I use. Many thanks to Claude Code for helping me."

Imran gets partial credit for staying on topic while also being nice.

Finding Needs in Documentation Haystacks

Caitlin B. shared something real: "One thing I am thankful to GenAI for is helping me spend less time digging through documentation to see whether something is possible. A recent example was trying to see how to export data objects from ServiceNow. Cloudia (Mission’s internal AI chatbot) was able to tell me how you would do that and what API to use, and so I knew exactly where to look in the ServiceNow documentation to check the functionality instead of having to spend a bunch of time reading through and understanding all the different APIs ServiceNow has."

Goodbye to Grunt Work

Eddie S. got philosophical: "I'm grateful for Claude Code freeing me up from time I'd otherwise be spending performing boring, repetitive, time-consuming, mundane but necessary tasks to progress my work and allowing me to focus more of my time where I can add real value."

Eddie speaks for everyone who's ever had to write the same boilerplate code for the 47th time.

My Take

I have to agree with Max and Chris. I am grateful for the people I work with at Mission. I work with people who get excited about tools that make their jobs better and are using AI to skip the boring stuff and focus on the interesting problems. They are solving problems for our customers that previously felt impossible.

Also, Caitlin shared that she’s enjoying these TikTok videos of AI-generated dogs cooking. Honestly, that's the energy we should all bring to AI adoption.

Happy Thanksgiving. Eat too much pie. Take a break from thinking about AI for like 48 hours. And then, I’ll see you at AWS re:Invent!

Until next time,
Ryan

Now, time for this week’s AI-generated image and the prompt I used to create it:

Create an image of a dog working as a server at Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen in Las Vegas. The restaurant is jam packed because tons of people are in Vegas for AWS re:Invent. The meal is a Thanksgiving turkey. 

(I really don’t like that it gave the dog human hands…)