The Junior Engineer Gap

Senior engineers are farming their implementation work to AI. That's efficient for them. But the work they're offloading is the same work that junior engineers used to learn on. So where does that leave the juniors? The learning path disappeared Juniors learn on the job. That's how it has always worked. You start with small tasks, make mistakes in a safe environment, get feedback from someone more experienced, and gradually take on more complex…

https://sodoherty.ai/2026/03/17/the-junior-engineer-gap/

Build the Tool, Not the Thing

Three weeks of work became two days. Twenty minutes of manual effort became three seconds. Not by working harder or hiring more people. By changing the question from "how can AI do this work" to "how can AI build something that does this work." The migration problem A common challenge we face with watsonx Orchestrate is migration. Clients have existing virtual assistants built on older platforms, and they need to move them across.

https://sodoherty.ai/2026/03/10/build-the-tool-not-the-thing/

Exploring the Orchestrate

I spend a lot of time working inside watsonx Orchestrate. Agents, tools, knowledge bases, the connections between them. After a while you build a mental model of how everything fits together, but it stays in your head. I wanted to see it. So I built wxo-explorer - a 3D network graph that connects to a watsonx Orchestrate instance via its REST API and renders the whole environment as something you can fly around and interact with.

https://sodoherty.ai/2026/02/24/exploring-the-orchestrate/

Same Instructions, Different Game

I wanted to see how different agentic coding tools handle the same problem. Not a todo app. Not a REST API. Something that would force them to make decisions. A while back I built a text adventure in watsonx Assistant for Halloween. A haunted mansion where you had to escape while a ghost wandered the rooms. It was a good test of what the platform could do and I enjoyed building it.

https://sodoherty.ai/2026/02/22/same-instructions-different-game/

Using LoRA with Granite 3.3

IBM just announced Granite 3.3 with lots of new features! I am going to focus on the LoRA adapter feature for this post and how to use it. LoRA stands for "Low rank adaptation" which is a way to fine tune LLMs fast and cheap, while mitigating "Model collapse" that can happen with normal transfer learning. It does this by locking down the model except for a few parts that you can tweak.

https://sodoherty.ai/2025/04/20/using-lora-with-granite-3-3/

In this walkthrough I show you how to create user journeys without having your content creator to touch JSON.

https://sodoherty.ai/2024/04/08/making-user-journeys-easy-to-create/

Working with hex in watsonx assistant

Converting to/from hex in watsonx Assistant is easy if you use an extension. If you don't have that choice then you need to get creative in how to do it. In the video I am going to cover. Converting Text/Integers to and from hex code. Show how to create temporary variables within your action. Sub-action notation to help your content creator fill out correctly. Here is the sample assistant used in the video.…

https://sodoherty.ai/2024/04/07/working-with-hex-in-watsonx-assistant/

Connect to WML from watsonx Assistant

This is a common question that comes up and there is no simple answer. So I have created this video to walk through how to do this. The video also covers a couple of topics. How to modify an extension where anyOf, oneOf or allOf are used. Creating an action variable for using in code. Skip button to change your models input. Here are the files related to the video. WML2wxAssistantDownload

https://sodoherty.ai/2023/12/12/connect-to-wml-from-watsonx-assistant/

Converting flowcharts to Actions

I've had to present this so often that I finally bit the bullet and created a generic how-to video. In this video I show how you can quickly create an action from a flowchart. With the following points. Showing a simple easy to follow flowchart structure. The process of chunking which allows you to easily see the steps. When to use conditions versus fall through to steps.

https://sodoherty.ai/2023/11/08/converting-flowcharts-to-actions/