Darren Duke’s Fiber Chart Calculator
Darren Duke, WK&T Telecommunications’ plant and engineering manager, considered himself a novice user of artificial intelligence prior to February’s AI workshop led by Carlton Davis. He’d just begun to dip his toe into the vast waters of possibility in the previous month, but it quickly became apparent that AI could assist Darren with a wide range of tasks, including creating customized dashboards that once would have taken days, weeks, or months to build.
During the workshop’s “vibe coding” session, attendees experimented with using desired outcomes to prompt large language models, or LLMs, rather than having to write code themselves. Think, “Build me an app that does X, Y, and Z.” Darren asked ChatGPT to build an app that would help his fiber-to-the-home technicians identify which fiber strands to use during installations based on fiber count.
In Darren’s own words, the prompt asked for an app that would grant technicians the ability to “input the start of fiber count and also provide the fiber number for an install/splice, and then it would automatically tell them the fiber tube color and also the fiber strand color.”
The first outcome wasn’t perfect, requiring a few post-workshop tweaks, but Darren says those were mostly cosmetic changes and other small user experience, or UX, improvements. WK&T technicians are now using the app with great success.
The workshop and results from the vibe coding session ignited Darren’s enthusiasm for exploring AI and using it to enhance workflows and efficiency. Initially, he hoped to understand how AI could benefit the departments he oversees, but is now inspired to discover how AI can help with cross-collaboration among teams, decision-making optimization, and improving the co-op as a whole. His only concern is data security, which is of the utmost importance to WK&T. But Darren hopes that while AI use must start at the top down, eventually employees can be encouraged to use AI to develop their own tools and maximize productivity.
