AI Articles

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2025 Exceptional Employer Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Tech Employer, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named Exceptional Employer by TechPoint at the 26th annual Mira Awards. This award recognizes companies that are developing talent through skills-based hiring…
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Planning-First AI Methodology: The Foundation of Successful AI Collaboration

Why starting with understanding, not code, is the key to unlocking AI’s full potential in software development Picture this: You’re 7 hours into your work day, you’re on your third cup of coffee, and the AI just generated 200 lines of code that compile perfectly… and do absolutely nothing you wanted. Sound familiar? If you’ve […]
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The AI Coding Revolution: Why Your Development Team Needs to Invest Now or Risk Being Left Behind

 A developer’s perspective on mastering AI coding tools for competitive advantage The software development landscape has undergone more transformation in the past year than in the previous decade combined. As AI coding tools evolve from novelty to necessity, development teams face a critical decision: invest heavily in learning these tools now, or watch competitors pull […]
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From PDF Chaos to AI-Powered Organization: An Engineer’s Journey into Document Processing

How I built an intelligent document processing system using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), local LLMs, and Python – leveraging my code generation AI experience The Problem: Drowning in a Digital Morass Like many people, I had accumulated a large collection of PDF documents over the years – medical records, invoices, receipts, tax documents, insurance papers. […]
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Generality in Generative AI is an Illusion

Large language models are often described as general-purpose problem solvers. That’s fair; given a prompt, they can write SQL queries, summarize academic papers, troubleshoot YAML files, produce a mediocre chili recipe, and draft HR emails, all in the same breath. That breadth of capability is a big driver of the current enthusiasm. Here’s the thing […]
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Learning AI Optimization w/ Factorio 1/x

Who am I? My name is Keith Hanson, I graduated from Rose-Hulman with a degree in Software Engineering in 2021. In my time since graduation I worked extensively with infrastructure as code and on backend systems. Notably what you won’t find in my project background is anything to do with AI. I took 1 course […]
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Navigating AI + Team Effectiveness with Llewellyn Falco: Highlights from SEPTalks

At a recent SEP Talks event—“AI, Team Effectiveness & the Future of Software Development”—we hosted a live fireside chat with industry expert Llewellyn Falco. We invited Llewellyn to help us think more deeply about the impact of AI on how we build software, collaborate, and grow as teams. What followed was a series of sharp […]
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RAG graphic illustration

Basics of Retrieval Augmented Generative (RAG) Systems

Lately, we’ve been fielding a lot of interest in custom Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. And honestly, it’s easy to see why. RAG systems are incredibly flexible tools for injecting up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge into AI responses for answering questions, generating content, analyzing internal data, or any other task that’s primarily completed by producing an artifact. […]
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AI Brain (nodes) with hexagons.

Intentional AI: Choosing the Right Tool for the Job

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days: headlines, investor decks, your last team meeting, and dinner conversations. Just because AI is hot doesn’t mean it’s well understood. Too often, people reach for AI like it’s duct tape: a fix-all solution for any digital dilemma. But like duct tape, AI has its limits. Some problems need glue, […]
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How AI, Design, and Creativity Landed Me 2 Weeks of ClusterTruck Lunches

Some contests are worth more than the prize, and this was one of them. Indy Design Week recently hosted a poster competition to help ClusterTruck revamp their promotional flyers for Dine to Donate events. The prize? Two weeks of free ClusterTruck lunches. The challenge? Taking a bland Illustrator template and transforming it into a design […]
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