zog do graph engineering

So apparently the new thing is “graph engineering”.

Prompt engineering, then loop engineering, now graph engineering.

I was frantically reading articles this week with my normal low-grade panic that the industry had invented something new & important (yet again) while I was busy with my day job & faffing about with my own framework in the evenings.

But I struggle to see the new & important ideas. It kind of feels like we did one big meta loop in “how we work”.

Now we’re pitching boxes, arrows, forks, sign-offs. Essentially what happens in what order, what runs side by side, who has to approve what, what to do when a step falls over.

It’s process design.

Business Process Design + AI = GRAPH ENGINEERING!

(The term means about three different things depending on who you ask. I mean the workflow one.)

The difference is that the boxes used to hold applications, checklists, RACI matrixes and the poor, poor human in charge of driving it.

Even the really ‘amazing’ part, the graphs that redraw themselves as they go, are not new.

Every process has a box where the diagram gives up and someone just figures it out: the team lead splitting up the work, whoever picks up the weird ticket. Nobody could define every possible branch up front, so we put a sensible human at the fork, said “use judgement”, and then moved on with our lives.

Now instead of always putting a human there, we can put AI. It still can’t wander off and do whatever it wants - we put in guardrails for that - but at the forks we pick, it makes the call. This is programmatic delegation with logging.

Most of my time working on my own workflow, friday (because I initially built it on a friday and I am not very creative), hasn’t gone into the process itself. That graph is actually pretty simple and boring (also because it’s a one man operation rather than an enterprise operation). The real time & effort goes into everything that is built around it - the loops, the checks before anything moves on, when agent delegation happens, which gates can and can’t be bypassed, notes on every judgment call so they can be audited.

Same process - different mechanisms & tooling.

We’re not cavemen who discovered fire this week. I’m fairly positive we just realised that there are better ways to cook with it…

There’s a Far Side comic about exactly this - just Google “Hey! Look what Zog do!” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Somewhere, a business analyst is screaming into a pillow.