Extensibility

Extensibility

Extensibility is allowing your customers to extend or customize your AI software. Although your first thought is going to be to run off and build an API or an SDK, there are a few things to consider first. The simpler ways to “extend” are:

• Just add more features.
• Add configuration settings.
• Add command-line options.
• Add minor personalization features.

Adding customer features. The basic problem that customers have is that they want to find a way to do something. If they're looking to extend your software, well, that means that some feature is lacking. If one customer finds this issue, other customers are probably silently suffering. So, rather than building an API, just listen to your customer, and add some more features to your code that will solve the issue, and other reasonably similar issues.

Configuration settings. Think about your AI's configuration settings from the point-of-view of extensibility. If you prefer, call them “declarative extensions.” It's much easier for a customer to change a config option than to write a program using your SDK. Consider elevating and documenting some of the different ways that an AI engine can be configured, to give your customers more capabilities. Yes, this does significantly increase the error handling code and QA testing cycle, so this is a careful consideration: which of your internal config options do you hide or publicize?

Personalization options. When you're deep in the guts of an AI engine, you're thinking about really brain-intensive stuff like vectorizing your tokenizer. Your customer, however, just wants to put their company's name at the top of their AI-generated report. Hence, focus on adding some of the “smaller” functionality that seems trivial to engineers, but is what customers want. Maybe, like the wheel, the report could even have different colors?

And one final point about extensibility: your customers aren't programmers. They don't even know what the acronyms API and SDK stand for. Your customers need an API like a fish needs a bicycle.

• Next: • Up: Table of Contents • Buy: Generative AI in C++: Coding Transformers and LLMs

The new AI programming book by Aussie AI co-founders: AI coding in C++ Transformer engine speedups LLM models Phone and desktop AI Code examples Research citations Get your copy from Amazon: Generative AI in C++