3 ms·

> OK - the whole process took a couple hours, and probably would have been a whole day if I were doing it on my own, since I usually only need to remember anyth

> OK - the whole process took a couple hours, and probably would have been a whole day if I were doing it on my own, since I usually only need to remember anything about SQL syntax once every year or three If you have any reasonable understanding of SQL, I guarantee you could brush up on it and write it yourself in less than a couple of hours unless you're trying to do something very complex SQL is absolutely trivial to write by hand

spunker540 2y ago
Obviously to a mega super genius like yourself an LLM is useless. But perhaps you can consider that others may actually benefit from LLMs, even if you’re way too talented to ever see a benefit? You might also consider that you may be over-indexing on your own capabilities rather than evaluating the LLM’s capabilities. Lets say an llm is only 25% as good as you but is 10% the cost. Surely you’d acknowledge there may be tasks that are better outsourced to the llm than to you, strictly from an ROI perspective? It seems like your claim is that since you’re better than LLMs, LLMs are useless. But I think you need to consider the broader market for LLMs, even if you aren’t the target customer.
- kragen 2y ago
  Knowing SQL isn't being a "mega super genius" or "way talented". SQL is flawed, but being hard to learn is not among its flaws. It's designed for untalented COBOL mainframe programmers on the theory that Codd's relational algebra and relational calculus would be too hard for them and prevent the adoption of relational databases. However, whether SQL is "trivial to write by hand" very much depends on exactly what you are trying to do with it.
sdenton4 2y ago
Sure, I could do that. But I would learn where to put my join statements relative to the where statements, and then forget it again in a month because I have lots of other tihngs that I actually need to know on a daily basis. I can easily outsource the boilerplate to the LLM and get to a reasonable starting place for free. Think of it as managing cognitive load. Wandering off to relearn SQL boilerplate is a distraction from my medium-term goal. edit: I also believe I'm less likely to get a really dumb 'gotcha' if I start from the LLM rather than cobbling together knowledge from some random docs.
- layer8 2y ago
  If you don’t take care to understand what the LLM outputs, how can you be confident that it works in the general case, edge cases and all? Most of the time that I spend as a software engineer is reasoning about the code and its logic to convince myself it will do the right thing in all states and for all inputs. That’s not something that can be offloaded to an LLM. In the SQL case, that means actually understanding the semantics and nuances of the specific SQL dialect.

spunker540 2y ago

Obviously to a mega super genius like yourself an LLM is useless. But perhaps you can consider that others may actually benefit from LLMs, even if you’re way too talented to ever see a benefit? You might also consider that you may be over-indexing on your own capabilities rather than evaluating the LLM’s capabilities. Lets say an llm is only 25% as good as you but is 10% the cost. Surely you’d acknowledge there may be tasks that are better outsourced to the llm than to you, strictly from an ROI perspective? It seems like your claim is that since you’re better than LLMs, LLMs are useless. But I think you need to consider the broader market for LLMs, even if you aren’t the target customer.

kragen 2y ago
Knowing SQL isn't being a "mega super genius" or "way talented". SQL is flawed, but being hard to learn is not among its flaws. It's designed for untalented COBOL mainframe programmers on the theory that Codd's relational algebra and relational calculus would be too hard for them and prevent the adoption of relational databases. However, whether SQL is "trivial to write by hand" very much depends on exactly what you are trying to do with it.

sdenton4 2y ago

Sure, I could do that. But I would learn where to put my join statements relative to the where statements, and then forget it again in a month because I have lots of other tihngs that I actually need to know on a daily basis. I can easily outsource the boilerplate to the LLM and get to a reasonable starting place for free. Think of it as managing cognitive load. Wandering off to relearn SQL boilerplate is a distraction from my medium-term goal. edit: I also believe I'm less likely to get a really dumb 'gotcha' if I start from the LLM rather than cobbling together knowledge from some random docs.

layer8 2y ago
If you don’t take care to understand what the LLM outputs, how can you be confident that it works in the general case, edge cases and all? Most of the time that I spend as a software engineer is reasoning about the code and its logic to convince myself it will do the right thing in all states and for all inputs. That’s not something that can be offloaded to an LLM. In the SQL case, that means actually understanding the semantics and nuances of the specific SQL dialect.