Category: Artificial Intelligence
Vectors, Python, AI, and Your Face
Building a Facial Recognition System with Cursor AI At Don’t Panic Labs, I recently embarked on an prototype project to explore the intersection of computer vision, Python, and AI-assisted development. Our goal was to build a light-weight facial recognition system that could identify faces, create a searchable database, and analyze images. All while leveraging Cursor…
Read more…
MCP Magic: AI-Powered Azure SQL Analysis in Plain English
Imagine being able to ask your database questions in plain English and getting visualizations quickly. Traditional SQL analysis requires expertise in SQL query language and separate visualization tools. However, by combining MSSQL and Charting MCP servers in VS Code with natural language, we can enable data analysis for both technical and non-technical users. This powerful…
Read more…
What Military Intelligence Taught Me About Business Intelligence
The world of business intelligence came as second nature to me. Transitioning from the public to the private sector, I LOVED doing competitor analysis and analyzing the market, so much so that I didn’t understand why it wasn’t like that for everyone. As a product manager at the time, it just made sense. Talking with…
Read more…
CodeBreak: AI-Assisted Development – Part 3
In Part 2 of this series, we improved the prompts, which solved some of the last issues. But in Parts 1 and 2, a hidden helper was living beneath the surface, helping us along. That helper is the copilot-instructions.md file. I am pre-prompting the LLM with this file to show how I want things to…
Read more…
CodeBreak: AI-Assisted Development – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, we used a template to help with our prompting. Ultimately, it generated code for us. But that code wasn’t perfect. It had many small issues. Probably the most annoying was that it often gets import statements wrong. Now, these are super easy to fix, but they still require fixing….
Read more…
CodeBreak: AI-Assisted Development – Part 1
AI (Large Language Models, or LLMs) can be helpful in generating code quickly. The problem is that they often don’t generate useful code. To be honest, they often generate erroneous and potentially insecure code. In this blog post, I will show a potential template to use when prompting LLMs that will help get you closer…
Read more…
Don’t Panic Labs – The First 15 Years
April 2025 marks the 15th anniversary of the founding of Don’t Panic Labs. We are a software product development and innovation company in Nebraska that focuses on providing the necessary support, experience, and product development capacity to innovation groups and entrepreneurs to bring their innovative vision to life. In this blog post, I will be…
Read more…
Coding with AI: How to Get the Results You Actually Want
You can’t talk about software right now without talking about AI or, more accurately, LLMs. These are helping us write software faster. But can they help us be much faster? The common way they help us is by autocompleting code for us. I start writing a method called upsertUser, and then the AI will automatically…
Read more…
What I’ve Learned So Far on My AI for UX Journey
Starting a learning journey is an exciting and transformative experience that, for me, was filled with a mix of emotions. The excitement comes from my great sense of curiosity–the thrill of discovering new things and the anticipation that comes with each step of that journey. The anticipation of mastering a new skill, gaining knowledge, and…
Read more…
Artificial Intelligence Radically Changes Viability in Innovation
It’s impossible to have a conversation on innovation without wandering into artificial intelligence. Although it feels like AI has advanced lightyears in a mere matter of months, and in many ways, it has, the truth is that AI is a broad field and has been advancing for years. Recent advances in generative/large language models and…
Read more…