I’ve been using AI recently as a coding assistant. Look, some of it is vibe. I know. Criticize me all you want, but when I’m deep in some one-off rotten to the core dumb-ass SQL shit, I don’t have any interest in putting my brain to the task. It could take all day. I know because I’ve done it. I have to map out the schema, pore over it, carefully create the join statements, select and update. I have to test it first in a dev database and environment. It blew up. Ok, where did it blow up. Oh, I see, I made a typo there, or I was joining on the wrong thing and now have nine million duplicates or something. That’s cool, I wipe the database, cat the original data in again and go for another round.

And that’s how it is for a lot of things not just SQL. Yes, I could do it, but frankly I don’t derive any pleasure from jigsaw puzzles. Have any of you learned anything from a jigsaw puzzle? Did I learn anything figuring out a one off SQL statement or a hasty php script to update objects in one go?

Uff, maybe, like why didn’t I let ChatGPT do this in the first place.

AI does this stuff surprisingly well. I know what I want, I tell it, my basic problem, give it the database schema and let it give me the code all in one go. Yes, it makes mistakes, yes, you still have to check to make sure your data hasn’t blown up, but it’s made things so much easier and more pleasant.

I’ve read studies about loss of cognitive ability by offloading to ChatGPT, kinda like bone loss for astronauts. And yes, you need effort and resistance to build mass and ability. But I’m not sure how much I’d retain anyway. I don’t like SQL. It’s super powerful, but dreadfully complicated if there’s even a tiny bit of complexity in your db. It’s also typically one off stuff too. I’ll never reuse that query again. It’s usually employed to fix something that’s gone wonky, or where using the UI would take a impossible number of clicks to fix.

Bam, jigsaw puzzle complete, now I can do something more interesting.

Like regex!!! I loooooooooooove love me some regex.

Ugh!