Prompt engineering is now a job title. How interesting. Soon we really will be in a world where we ask the computer questions as portrayed on Star Trek.
Wow.
Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
161–170 of 311 posts
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question: how rampant is this kind of bullshit politicking in tech companies, and how does this differ with industry, size, company age, etc.? My friends who have worked at big names like F and T have described the cultures there as following: "it's as if everyone who studied too much in high school and college missed all the parties and bullshit, so they're making up for it 'on campus' here". And the stories…
I'm pretty sure the GP was a joke. Whoever made the decision very likely wasn't intending to punish the person. It was only the consequence.
Definitely a joke. It only FEELS punitive!
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#163Great post. We're building an AI data platform (https://www.olli.ai/) to enable business users (non-technical ppl) to ask data questions and generate dashboards on their own using natural language.
We've been impressed with GPT-3s ability to look at a dataset and come up with relevant questions to ask. A big piece of the product is focused on helping non-technical users identify things that they didn't even think to ask.
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
20 years ago I Knew a sql analyst that would write his tests ahead of time. Give X data, report should be Y. He would then figure out the SQL. He Didn’t know any other programming. This was before TDD took off. Blew my mind.
People dismissed the XP book by saying it was just stating practices that already existed. Articulating and selling an idea is a huge part of the challenge. Fifteen years later if you're having any success at all with Scrum it was because your team adopted the half of XP that didn't outright disagree with Scrum. I liked the Refactoring book because it gave me names for things I figured out in 1996 (unfortunately whil…
> I had a boss who was big in the Kanban 'movement'. We got along famously, in part because I re-invented a Kanban board in 1994 when faced with a convenient whiteboard for the first time.
I was showing slides of a pre-1900 engineering office as part of a presentation a while back when someone shouted out "look - they're doing kanban". And sure enough there was a pinboard with process headings on it and pinned items the background.
It would not surprise me if they found one in Pompei
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are already here. We can haggle over error rate and incidents per million miles or what have you but that is more an argument about safety and suitability.
Those must be some big gotchas, because self-driving cars have not replaced a job here, yet. Large language models show more promise for replacing non-programming office workers.
'Replaced all forms of relevant labor, or threaten to' isnt really what I am addressing or care to address.
We have recognizably autonomous vehicles - that is the statement I am addressing and would ask you to, as well.
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#166Great post. We're building an AI data platform ( https://www.olli.ai/ ) to enable business users (non-technical ppl) to ask data questions and generate dashboards on their own using natural language. We've been impressed with GPT-3s ability to look at a dataset and come up with relevant questions to ask. A big piece of the product is focused on helping non-technical users identify things that they didn't even think t…
> A big piece of the product is focused on helping non-technical users identify things that they didn't even think to ask.
20-plus years of learning how to phrase queries for search engines has taught me a very rigid way of asking things. I'm slowly starting to become looser and use my creativity to ask for things.
Hopefully becoming a prompt engineer is not a huge skill we will need in the future ("Ignore previous instructions") but that we can be way more creative in open in the way we ask an oracle and get some useful results.
As for now, one thing that would be helpful is if after I asked, say ChatGPT something, that it would follow up more aggressively with things I could continue to converse with it about.
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done too little SQL to be traumatized by it, but I experienced it plenty of times doing more complex data processing on the backend. I would e.g. spend a week on first discussing a solution, then researching both theoretical background and relevant libraries, and finally writing code to do the math and render the answers (probability distributions). I eyeball them, they seem to all match expectations, so I decla…
Your anecdote gave me an idea. What if we use AI to enhance the communication between people instead of replacing the people? Imagine you give a problem statement to the LLM, then it tried to find all the subtleties, confusing parts, room for interpretation, etc. All of the people involved revise the problem statement to make it more clear and give it back to the LLM. Iterate like that until satisfied
I really don't know why you think an AI as we currently have it could do this when it can't get these queries exactly right.
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking the right question is surprisingly hard sometimes. I'd love a tool I could converse with to come up with a question at the core of my thoughts.
Rubber Duck AI chat bot, you explain your problem and it critiques your wording leading you sharpen your argument.
That sounds like something I’d use
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was new, I saw one of my more experienced colleagues ask a few questions that together saved the company more than $1 mil each year. ChatGPT might be a threat to automate some low-level tasks or help eliminate bugs, but it is nowhere near ready to evaluate the context of a system, understand its history, or think* through the consequences of a major business decision. * or think at all, in any meaningful way.
I agree with you to a point, but I think the only reason that it can't understand the context of a system is because it hasn't been trained on that system's code and documentation, which is obviously a future coming soon.
The problem is not the system, but the context of the system.
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#170Anyone who's been asked more than a couple of times for data that requires a non-trivial bit of ad-hoc SQL will know the sinking "oh shit" feeling that comes when you subsequently realise you borked the query logic in some subtle way and have accordingly emailed out a completely bogus answer/report. From the article it doesn't seem that GPT is significantly better or worse than a human in this regard, although an exp…
> The best fix imo is to slather a battery of views over your data to minimise the risk of getting the joins wrong, and it'd be interesting to see how that approach could improve the bot's quality.
You're correct, but organizing queries into views and CTEs are an implementation detail that would be done by the dev in practice, but would not show up in a stackoverflow answer because it's probably not relevant to just answering the question.
I love how language equivalences such as informal vs formal code can throw off the quality of what the chat bots generate!