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Getting AI to write good SQL

(cloud.google.com)
478 points richards | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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pcblues ◴[] No.44014141[source]
Can someone please answer these questions because I still think AI stinks of a false promise of determinable accuracy:

Do you need an expert to verify if the answer from AI is correct? How is it time saved refining prompts instead of SQL? Is it typing time? How can you know the results are correct if you aren't able to do it yourself? Why should a junior (sorcerer's apprentice) be trusted in charge of using AI? No matter the domain, from art to code to business rules, you still need an expert to verify the results. Would they (and their company) be in a better place to design a solution to a problem themselves, knowing their own assumptions? Or just check of a list of happy-path results without a FULL knowledge of the underlying design? This is not just a change from hand-crafting to line-production, it's a change from deterministic problem-solving to near-enough is good enough, sold as the new truth in problem-solving. It smells wrong.

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1. BenderV ◴[] No.44014318[source]
My 2 cents, building a tool in this space...

> Do you need an expert to verify if the answer from AI is correct?

If the underling data has a quality issue that is not obvious to a human, the AI will miss it too. Otherwise, the AI will correct it for you. But I would argue that it's highly probable that your expert would have missed it too... So, no, it's not a silver bullet yet, and the AI model often lacks enough context that humans have, and the capacity to take a step back.

> How is it time saved refining prompts instead of SQL?

I wouldn't call that "prompting". It's just a chat. I'm at least ~10x faster (for reasonable complex & interesting queries).