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Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

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Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#251

Post by danielbln »

nmfisher wrote: post #232
Julesman wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't found GPT this reliable for coding. I've been maxing my hourly usage of ChatGPT since it launched and then switching to CoPilot and I have lots of good things to say about it. But reliability is not one of them. It has a tendency to ignore instructions, as mentioned, but also to get hung up on certain approaches or to use a different approach each time its asked. I'd guess it's very reliable for text genera…

I gave up on ChatGPT for code generation because I ended up spending more time tweaking prompts/fixing outputs than if I had just written it myself in the first place. I think this is probably the future of "coding" but it's not quite there yet. Is CoPilot any better?

I've found it to be significantly better at code mutation and documentation.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#252

Post by fifilura »

clbrmbr wrote: post #202
fifilura wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they actually like what they do... It can actually be pretty rewarding to be the person who knows most about the data in the company, while solving logic puzzles during the day. PS. i do hope most analysts solve more interesting problems than the ones in TFA.

Is that TFA as in RTFM?

Yes, maybe that acronym was in fashion a decade ago. And maybe on another forum like /.

But yes, similar meaning, but replace M with A = Article

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436632

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#253

Post by fifilura »

minsc_and_boo wrote: post #153
ellisv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's because most SQL analyst who can understand the data model, assumptions, quirks, etc. usually get promoted into other positions.

Yeah, IME the good business savvy SQL analysts get sucked into non-SQL assigned roles and nailing it because they write their own scripts.

Why so. Why do you mean scripts are better than SQL?

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#254

Post by jacky2wong »

Having worked in large corporate enterprises where the visualisation of data engineering and navigation to the relevant code-base was incredibly difficult - I see a lot of value in this. I think this is an absolute game-changer for engineers due to the often outdated documentation of the pipelines otherwise!

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#256

Post by eega »

> Playing around with GPT at this level you get the feeling that “recursive GPT” is very close to AGI. You could even ask GPT to reinforcement learn itself, adding new prompts based on fixes to previous questions. Of course, who knows what will happen to all this when GPT-4 drops.

Leaning out of the window way too much here. This has nothing to do with AGI, which would require an intrinsic understanding of not only SQL, but over, well, everything, not just a well-defined and easily checkable field like SQL.

Regarding GPT-4 - OpenAI‘s CEO Sam Altman stated that the expectations regarding GPT-4 are way over-hyped. People on the Internet talk as if AGI is coming in the guise of GPT-4, but it‘s „just“ going to be an incrementally better evolution of GPT-3.5.

Mind, I‘m in no way saying that LLM‘s aren’t exciting - they are to me - or that they will not change the world, but leave your horses in the stable.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#257

Post by dzamo_norton »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #95

It sounds dysfunctional to me that you need an oncall query writer. It sounds like this encourages business side to not plan ahead and book tech time but just last minute call up and say “er.. I need last quarters sales aggregated by region stat”.

Normally a question like "I need last quarters sales aggregated by region stat" would be trivially answered with a pivot table or OLAP cube built from a general purpose data warehouse. But there are also ad hoc reporting requirements that call for non trivial coding by a data analyst, e.g. "We think there's something fishy going on with the stock in warehouse B. Can you take this list of serial numbers and overlay their dispatch timestamps with the staff shift schedule, then ... etc."

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#258

Post by blowski »

mdcox wrote: post #224
_hcuq wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t you have just got ChatGPT to write the post?

no one wants to automate themselves out of a job, only other people.

We all believe our job is so challenging and has such special requirements that it _can't_ be automated. It requires someone with the kind of experience learned with wisdom over a long time. Blah blah blah.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#259

Post by unixhero »

>When I was at Square and the team was smaller we had a dreaded “analytics on-call” rotation. It was strictly rotated on a weekly basis, and if it was your turn up you knew you would get very little “real” work done that week and spend most of your time fielding ad-hoc questions from the various product and operations teams at the company (SQL monkeying, we called it).

To be part of an analytics team and deliver work like this is actually highly sought after and a great role to have. I don't know why the author thought it was terrible. Doing data analytics on a company's datasets is most certainly real work.

Doesn't take away from the point of the story though, GPT is great.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#260

Post by Hellmitioksldf »

mdcox wrote: post #224
_hcuq wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t you have just got ChatGPT to write the post?

no one wants to automate themselves out of a job, only other people.

Thats actually my strategy;

This makes it so that 1. my quality overall becomes better and my bosses always liked that (doing things per hand are more error prone, not on time etc.)

2. I can go on holiday knowing my company doesn't need me desperate

3. I can spend the free time of actually innovating and bringing more value to the company/product

The problem is not automating yourself out of a job but not being able to leverage the new gained capacity.

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