Ask the Programmer
Ask The Programmer Episode 255 - Guest Brian Magrogan Shares AI Tools and Uses for AV Programmers
01 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From the world of AV programming and control with James King, I'm Steve Greenblatt, and this is Ask the Programmer. Hey, James, how are you? It's good to be back with you, and it's been a minute since we've caught up.
I'm doing good, Steve, and yourself. Yeah, it's been a while. You had to go over to ISC without me and have fun, and I just stayed here in Vegas and worked.
Well, we'll be in your town soon. But yes, we haven't had a gap in our releases, but we've had a little gap in our recordings because of ISE. And it was a great show. It was very well attended. And it was a really good sign for what I think is a good future for the AV industry. And trade shows certainly are not going away based on that 92,000 people. Yeah.
But yes, you were missed and we are going to have to figure out some way of bringing the Ask the Programmer community together at Infocomm coming up in 2026. So stay tuned for that. We do have an exciting guest with us today and somebody who we also haven't talked with in some time. He was last on episodes 138 and 139, so it's over 100 episodes ago.
He's a good friend and somebody that I've known for many years and is an excellent podcast guest. It's Brian McGrogan. He's a senior systems programmer and network systems engineer at Verix. Welcome, Brian. Thank you.
Thank you very much for having me back. It's really great to see you guys. I kind of didn't realize how many episodes it's been. That's amazing. It's really had been great to watch the podcast grow and all the different episodes. So that's really awesome. Thank you guys for having me back. I'm really excited about today.
We're really glad to have you, and we're going to talk about a real exciting topic. But if you do want to learn more about Brian, check out his past episodes. He tells a little bit about his background in AV and some more of his story of how he's come to become a programmer. So what we are going to talk about today is something that is, I think, a buzzword that everybody has heard.
Because if you haven't, you certainly have been living under a rock. We're going to talk about AI. What we're going to talk about specifically, though, is how AI is actually used and the benefit that we've been able to get from it from a programming perspective, from an everyday perspective. Brian's going to share with us a little bit about what he's
been able to use it for specifically as his everyday programming role. So Brian, why don't you tell us a little bit about AI and how you've approached it and some of the value you've seen from it?
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Chapter 2: How has AI impacted programming in the AV industry?
You know, that same thing. I think you use the example of like the purchase order or your notes from ISC. I have taken it now and thrown an API into it and asked for a base class to control this device. And it's nowhere near perfect, right? There are little syntax errors and there are little things, but I have found kind of like you said with
keeping a conversation open for that, that it's learning from what you're doing and you pass it back. Usually I'll copy and paste the line back and say, you know, there's an error here with X, Y, Z. We forgot to do this in order to properly return it. It was the wrong data type, wrong something. And you get a response back, oh, yes, that's correct. We corrected it by doing this.
And then the next time it will respond properly to that. So especially when you're talking about kind of more proprietary, like if you use it with Crestron and SimplePlus and SimpleSharp, A lot of the things get a little goofy just because of data types and the way that their language syntax works that what it's looking at is definitely not the way Crestron has chosen to do it in the end.
But that's the main example that comes to mind is that control script class. It was so great to use and very, very refreshing to be able to use it.
I've come to find, at least when I work with it, it gets to know really our industry, which is pretty fascinating. It's educated on what we do and who we are, and it doesn't hallucinate when it comes to things in our industry. Of course, it's not going to be perfect, but I'm pretty impressed with how well it knows our industry.
Do you pay attention to the prompts when you've asked?
like when it says thinking and it will say searching groups.io searching sdk.crushdown.com searching you know uh this reddit group this and it's interesting to see because it is going to the av av specific places to try to get that info so it is it's i actually i will admit it was uh one of the sessions i'm doing at infocomm this year was one kind of i was
put into. It wasn't like I designed it or thought about it. It was like someone who's like went to a session I did one year and like, we need a different session, but kind of the same thing. And they're like, you should be the best person to talk about it. So they already had the details and all the stuff for the session done, which wasn't what I wanted to talk about.
So I took their description and I threw it in chat GPT. I'm like, oh, let's change it this way.
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Chapter 3: What specific AI tools does Brian Magrogan use as a programmer?
And he did. And it gave me a great, you know, description of what I wanted to talk about, you know, in way they want it. And then it even came back and go, do you want the VIXA learning a job, uh, uh, objectives for this? I'm like, yes. And he created all the learning objectives for me. And I just sent that right over.
It was again, reviewing, I think what Brian and see even, you know, you might imagine is you have to review it. It's not taking it by, uh, and being like, hey, this is 100% and sending it over. There was things I had to massage on it and be like, oh, nope, change this, fix this. But, you know, it got me to that 80%. And, you know, we took it over the goal line and we fixed it.
Yeah. And getting right that 80% helps free you up to do other things too, right? Like some of those things that maybe you don't get a chance to do, like I'd love to take this training class. And I was able to save myself over the last couple of weeks, four hours, which gave me the ability to do that training class or whatever the case may be.
My biggest thing is I'm I know it's a big buzz topic and stuff with AI is the bias built into it. And there's tons of bias. And like, I had one where I, again, like Steven mentioned, saving the conversation, which is great, because it's one I'm working on. I got to resize it, got to fix it. But I actually asked to create a job description.
And I purposely say, I want this to be an inclusive, you know, I want, you know, minorities, females, all be able to apply for it, use that language. And it through the standard muscle of 40 pounds. I'm like, is that really a requirement? Like to me, what it's not.
But so I have to rethink that because I know from history is a lot of times females will see muscle of 50 pounds, muscle of 40 pounds and be like, oh, I can't do that and not apply. So now you just using that language, you are holding those people away from applying your job. And I purposely said, hey, I want everyone to be able to apply for this.
And now he's using language that is going to prevent people from applying.
It's interesting that you use that example, James, because my wife is job hunting at the moment and when I was applying and really not getting any responses at all. And then we said, wait a minute, hold on. Like we had gone through and done her resume together, updated it and we're tweaking it for each of the positions based on what she was applying for, but getting like no callbacks.
And then all of a sudden we threw it into chat GPT and then we throw in the job description and
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Chapter 4: How can AI assist with hardware research for AV projects?
and say, can you help me modify my resume specifically at first to get me past the automatic screening system, right? Because now there are so many resumes coming in that you don't even make it past the automatic screening system, you don't get anything at all. And all of a sudden, like, just like you said, you have to go back through and massage the language and make it back into your words.
But it's giving you those little shifts. And same as you said, Steve, she's got a chat open for it. She's got a topic open for it. And she'll put in a new job description and it will say, oh, this resume that we did is great for this. We're going to tweak X, Y, Z. Here's the result you reviewed. Are there any changes you'd like to make? And it's really done a great job.
Number one, I think it's kind of helped her a little bit take some pressure off and not feel like she's got to redo her resume every single time. And just the fact that she's getting some calls has been helping her a lot there. So I think that's another great use for it too. And that's obviously outside the AV realm per se.
I agree with all the things that you're saying. And one of the things that I've found is that Anything that's outward facing, code is harder because it's behind the scenes, but outward facing has to still sound like you. Because if it doesn't, there's a big tell there. And while AI can make you sound smart, it has to still sound like you.
I'm not 100% in agreement with that. Yes, I agree. We need to put it in our own language. But think about it this way. I really thought about this for a while. Let's take the job of carpentry. People used to use hammer, nails, cool. And then, you know, nail guns came in, power tools came in. Does that discredit the person?
Because now they're using a tool that, you know, makes them more efficient. We know they're using that tool. Doesn't mean that that person is less capable of being a carpenter. So same thing. We're utilizing a tool that helps us maybe do the job better, more efficient. Who cares if people know we're using it, if we're using it correctly?
If I take a hammer and try to use it as a screwdriver, that shows I'm not a carpenter.
And you just wanted to be representative of you and what you want there to be alignment between you when you meet somebody and also the way they're presented on paper maybe is a good way of saying that.
Yeah. I think the thing to be careful about there, right, is you don't want to ā obviously we love a challenge, right? That's what helps us grow. That's what, you know, like I take on a big project and I'm like, oh, I am not sure about X, Y, Z in this. Like, this is going to be the first time we're using this hardware or this is something totally new. Like, good, challenge. I get to learn more.
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Chapter 5: What are some practical applications of AI in everyday programming tasks?
Trust it but verify it. Yep. For sure.
So I'd be curious to hear what some of our audience thinks and what they've used AI for. And it would be great to be able to help educate one another because I do think that AI makes you better, but it also makes you stronger because I'm sure that you're learning to be a better programmer as you're using AI. the AI generated code.
And honestly, programming is likely going to be adopting more AI where that just becomes part of the workflow. And I think not using it is probably going to be putting people behind the eight ball. And as you guys mentioned too, the idea of being a junior and moving to a senior level is probably going to take different shape moving forward.
Yeah. I mean, and if you think about it a little bit too, right? Like as you were talking, Steve, this came to my head, like we've had IntelliSense for, I don't even know how long, right? Like that's, it's trying to fill a little bit of what you're doing and just kind of help you along. And that's kind of AI is the next big step from that, right?
It's like, oh, you know, I know what kind of class you're trying to write. Here you go. This is where we are. So, and to work in line together.
I'm glad that we all kind of agree that AI, it's positives, that way it's negatives, and it's a tool, and it also is something that programmers should be encouraged to be adopting. So I'd like to hear again what our audience thinks, and it's a great conversation that we can continue in the Ask the Programmer community.
which I know Brian's part of, and James and I try to participate in as much as possible. So please join us there. Brian, how can people get in touch with you? How can they learn more about what you're doing and also pose any questions or reach out to you?
You can find me on all the social medias, at B. McGrogan. You can find me at my company, Verix, verix.com. And I'm always happy to have a conversation, always happy to help. I love seeing the community and seeing all the different questions that come in. It's really fantastic. We build off one another. You guys think of things that I often would not, and it sends me down the rabbit hole.
So please reach out.
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Chapter 6: How can AI improve communication and messaging in professional settings?
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And as we mentioned before, we're trying to bring this community together so that programmers can exchange ideas and have conversations like these more often. And we have picked the LinkedIn group to be our center of that universe. So check us out there. So thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Until next time, this has been Ask the Programmer.