Business Case Studies & Business Publications

Coding Data Models with AI

Cowan, Alex, Grush...

Technical Note

Coding Data Models with AI

Cowan, Alex; Grushka-Cockayne, Yael

OM-1825 | Published December 4, 2024 | 46 pages Technical Note

Collection: Darden School of Business

Add To Cart Buy Now

Product Details

This note focuses on building models that allow for the effective organization and retrieval of data. It discusses the major steps of designing, creating, and maintaining a model that optimizes user experience (UX) and best serves its developers’ end goals. The note is part of a series focused on helping MBAs acquire (1) a foundational understanding of how to go from design to code, and (2) a smooth transition to hands-on practice to improve their intuition and creative confidence around the process. Like others in the series, this note assumes some familiarity with the model-view-controller pattern, which is the idea that a given application can be usefully decomposed into a data model, a set of user views, and a set of controllers that implement the application’s behavior (for more on this, see a companion note by Alex Cowan and Yael Grushka-Cockayne, “Coding for MBAs in the Age of AI,” UVA-OM-1822). In “Coding Data Models with AI,” coding is organized around four consistent steps: focusing and communicating design intent, unpacking things you want to happen into codable steps, effectuating between alternatives, and testing and debugging. To learn more about using these steps to code user interfaces, see Alex Cowan and Yael Grushka-Cockayne, “Coding User Interfaces with AI” (UVA-OM-1823).