Bringing technical clarity to the unknown

Griping as a Service, on vBrownBag

09 Oct 2026 🔖 prompt engineering
💬 EN

Table of Contents

I presented “Griping as a Service: LLM-assisted requirements analysis” on vBrownBag.

Video

Main video

Tip: immediately flip the resolution to full 1080 HD, because YouTube keeps trying to blur the text.

Missing intro

Slides

Slides PDF

  1. To check out chat from the broadcast, visit any of the following recordings:
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Notes

Updated abstract

I think the day-to-day of enterprise IT operations doesn’t naturally refresh a “software product management” mindset – thinking in terms of “feature roadmaps” and “software development lifecycles” and such.

After all, it’s not like folks in ops typically go to 15-minute standups full of colorful “user story” sticky notes.

But then suddenly proposals to do “infrastructure as code” come along, and wow, what a context switch. Suddenly, you do have to ask yourself what you really want as a feature set, because the sky’s kind of the limit.

Particularly compared to, say, answering a ticket to create a new Active Directory group (where there’s an obvious surface-level definition of “done,” and probably one or only tools capable of doing it).

I think LLMs can help us techies do miniature strategic planning sessions, and ask ourselves:

“What do I want?

Original abstract

“Desire paths,” small eroded shortcuts across a lawn when perfectly good sidewalks exist, represent humanity as its most stubborn, lazy, and inconsiderate about the past – and its most correct, honest, and visionary about the future.

Like a civil engineer designing next year’s sidewalk from this year’s mud, you can conduct “mini blameless postmortems” with large language models (LLMs) and transform your pain into plans.

Morning-of ponders

I’m amused that this talk’s topic is coalesced in the way it did, in the morning on the day we aired.

I brought this talk to a podcast with IT systems administration roots, because I came up with these ideas while helping IT operations administrators plan infrastructure-as-code modernization initiatives (article link).

My initial audience was enterprise employees whose “customers” are all their own in-house colleagues, and who simply wanted to write code for themselves and their teams, to “automate the boring stuff” about their own jobs. The “griping” I had in mind – which seemed to be a key to unlocking LLM assistance with requirements analysis – was, initially, frustrations about the process of teamwork itself. LLMs can transform your secret complaints about your colleagues and bosses into roadmaps for useful automation code.

I even marketed the talk with the hashtag #sysadmin in every post.

Two days ago, pre-consulting for another such admin team led me to say:

“You know, I’m doing a podcast about this Wednesday night. About how operations work so often constrains your options that the sky hasn’t been the limit to what you can theoretically invent.

So most admins haven’t had the chance to spend years thinking about code in a ‘product’ mindset with software development lifecycles.

“Oh. Hey.

“I should probably find a way to slip that into my talk.”

And then on the morning of the show, Chris Williams, vBrownBag’s host, didn’t say a darned word about #sysadmin. He talked about user frustrations and product feedback.

His timing couldn’t be better, because really, even if you are the user, you deserve to be heard – by, well, yes, you, the coder! 😅

And there are business techniques out there that can make that happen (largely well-known in the domain of software product management).

Thanks for the mind-reading, Chris, and it was awesome to hang out with all of you!

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