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Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

Dan Darnell is a co-owner and vice president at Arkansas Data Services. Dan loves to write code, talk about code, design things, and, most of all, to work with other people to solve problems and create solutions. Dan has worked successfully as a consultant, managed companies large and small, and has written for international publications (including two books on Java for the IBM i). You can reach Dan at ddarnell@ark-data-services.com. Eric Whitcomb is a freelance author, software developer, and thinker. Eric loves to dissect problems in realms across disciplines and dimensions. He excels at taking these thought experiments and turning them into real-world applications, wherein the application might be everything from software to a screenplay. Eric has extensive experience with all-things-AI. If you Grok, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, or slide into the Wild West of open source AI, Eric has been there too. You can reach Eric at eric@rootmedium.com.

  • Guru: Deterministic Application Development With AI

    July 27, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

    Perhaps the key feature of AI is the way answers are obtained by virtue of a conversation with the AI. Contrast this with using a search engine where each “ask” is an independent request with a response.

    An AI conversation has context while search engine interactions do not. More and more, we use AI to create applications through the contextual, iterative, conversational process. As we have ideas we add these to the conversation and our application changes accordingly. Our customers are getting in on the action too. They are providing us with AI generated prototypes for new software or new …

    Read more
  • GenAI Is The Death Of Deterministic Project Budgeting

    June 15, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

    Like many of you in the IBM i community, we have been treading the AI waters for a couple of years now, starting with small proof-of-concept applications such as chatbots but progressing to far more advanced and complex code-to-AI interfaces.

    One such project leveraged AI for recurring Jaccard similarity index processing over large sets of business data. The small projects fool a person into thinking that the large projects are just more of the same but, in reality, large projects take you into the world of proprietary AI APIs and can be complex engineering efforts.

    We mostly use ChatGPT because …

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