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LLMs are also very good at writing code for newly invented languages, especially if they can execute it and iterate. I strongly believe the barrier to switch la
by reitzensteinm 1mo ago
LLMs are also very good at writing code for newly invented languages, especially if they can execute it and iterate. I strongly believe the barrier to switch languages is lowered in a post LLM world.
Ten years ago I was at a startup where we used Datomic, and it was okay, but six months in the sales team was like “ok how do I run SQL queries so I can triage leads”. We had no answer of course.
Today it would simply be: type what you want in natural language and we’ll generate the query with Claude.
I just tried one representative query from that startup against a hypothetical datalog query tool in Rust and it did just fine.
- scythmic_waves 1mo agoI agree that an LLM could also generate the code for a new query language. But my point is that fewer people will attempt to author a new query language in the first place because an LLM will be writing the queries either way. So the effort would be less impactful.
- reitzensteinm 1mo agoYou're right, I was talking past you. I have an implicit belief that SQL isn't the most effective low level language we could have and LLMs will free us up to explore that space, similar to asm.js -> WASM. But I'm open to being wrong about that.
- alliao 1mo agoI think it strikes a good balance between still human-readable and low-ish.. any lower I suspect you'd need to dedicate a lot more documentation else where..
- huahaiy 1mo agoDatalog exists and there are so many implementations.
- huahaiy 1mo agoAgree. Especially when Datalog queries are simpler to write and faster to run than SQL, there is a strong reason to at least try it.
- marcus_holmes 1mo agoI did this with our team: I created a schema.md document with an LLM-friendly explanation of the schema, and walked the whole team through how to create a Grafana query using an LLM and this document. Within a couple of weeks we have totally non-technical folks with very sophisticated queries in their dashboards. It works fine. It was very cut-and-paste, though, and I'm working (when I get the chance) on doing this via a chat interface where the LLM can interact directly with the database and Grafana to make it smoother. So I think the answer is not necessarily new languages, just better integration with the final interface. In an ideal world we should be able to ask in chat "what were the sales numbers for last quarter for APAC excluding the three largest customers?" and get an answer near-instantly, and then we don't really need to deal with queries or languages at all.
- alliao 1mo agodid you use llm to create the llm-friendly schema.md? This sounds like a brilliant idea I might need to steal it... thanks!
- marcus_holmes 1mo agoYeah, but it was a lot of questioning and refining to get it to understand the wrinkles and edge cases. I think we're on about version 5 of the doc now