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Getting AI to write good SQL

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Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#261
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know regex. But I use it so sparingly that every time I need it I forgot again the character for word boundary, or the character for whitespace, or the exact incantation for negative lookahead. Is it >!? who knows. A shortcut to type in natural language and get something I can validate in seconds is really useful.

How do you validate it if you don’t know the syntax? Or are you saying that looking up syntax –> semantics is significantly quicker than semantics –> syntax? Which I don’t find to be the case. What takes time is grokking the semantics in context, which you have to do in both cases.

In my case most of my regex is for utility scripts for text processing. That means that I just run the script, and if it does what I want it to do I know I'm done.

LLMs have been amazing in my experience putting together awk scripts or shell scripts in general. I've also discovered many more tools and features I wouldn't have otherwise.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#262

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 ma…

I can bring data here:

We recently did the first speed run where Louie.ai beat teams of professional cybersecurity analysts in an open competition, Splunk's annual Boss of the SOC. Think writing queries, wrangling Python, and scanning through 100+ log sources to answer frustratingly sloppy database questions:

- We get 100% correct for basic stuff in the first half that takes most people 5-15 minutes per question, and 50% correct in the second half that most people take 15-45+ minute per question, and most teams time out in that second half.

- ... Louie does a median 2-3min per question irrespective of the expected difficulty, so about 10X faster than a team of 5 (wall clock), and 30X less work (person hours). Louie isn't burnt out at the end ;-)

- This doesn't happen out-of-the-box with frontier models, including fancy reasoning ones. Likewise, letting the typical tool here burn tokens until it finds an answer would cost more than a new hire, which is why we measure as a speedrun vs deceptively uncapped auto-solve count.

- The frontier models DO have good intuition , understand many errors, and for popular languages, DO generate good text2query. We are generally happy with OpenAI for example, so it's more on how Louie and the operator uses it.

- We found we had to add in key context and strategies. You see a bit in Claude Code and Cursor, except those are quite generic, so would have failed as well. Intuitively in coding, you want to use types/lint/tests, and same but diff issues if you do database stuff. But there is a lot more, by domain, in my experience, and expecting tools to just work is unlikely, so having domain relevant patterns baked in and that you can extend is key, and so is learning loops.

A bit more on louie's speed run here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leo-meyerovich-09649219_genai...

This is our first attempt at the speed run. I expect Louie to improve: my answers represent the current floor, not the ceiling of where things are (dizzyingly) going. Happy to answer any other q's where data might help!

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#263

Can I just say that Google AI Studio with latest Gemini is stunningly, amazingly, game changingly impressive. It leaves Claude and ChatGPT's coding looking like they are from a different century. It's hard to believe these changes are coming in factors of weeks and months. Last month i could not believe how good Claude is. Today I'm not sure how I could continue programming without Google Gemini in my toolkit. Gemini…

> Gemini AI Studio is such a giant leap ahead in programming I have to pinch myself when I'm using it

Every time in the last three or four weeks, there is a post here about Gemini, the top comment, or one of the top comments is something along these lines. And every time I spend a few minutes making empirical tests to check if I made a mistake in cancelling my paid Gemini account after giving up on it...

So I just did a couple of tests sending the same prompt on some AWS related questions to Gemini Pro 2.5 (free) and Claude paid, and no, Claude still better.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Gemini2.5 Pro through work and it is excellent. However, I use Claude 3.7 Sonnet via API for personal use using money added to their account. I couldn’t find a way to use Gemini like a prepaid plan. I ain’t giving my credit card to Google for an LLM that can easily charge me hundreds or thousands of EUR.

Try OpenRouter. Load up with $20 of credits and use their API for a variety of models across providers, including Gemini. I think you pay ~5% extra for the OpenRouter service.

Do you work for OpenRouter?

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#265
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you get the added benefit of writing queries in JSON instead of raw SQL. I’m sorry, I can’t. The tail is wagging the dog. dang, can you delete my account and scrub my history? I’m serious.

This may be the best comment on Hacker News ever.

I think that honor still belongs to "Did you win the Putnam?" [0] but this is definitely still in the top 5.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#266

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 ma…

[deleted]

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#267

Can I just say that Google AI Studio with latest Gemini is stunningly, amazingly, game changingly impressive. It leaves Claude and ChatGPT's coding looking like they are from a different century. It's hard to believe these changes are coming in factors of weeks and months. Last month i could not believe how good Claude is. Today I'm not sure how I could continue programming without Google Gemini in my toolkit. Gemini…

I’ve yet to see any llm proselytizers acknowledge this glaring fact:

Each new release is “game changing”.

The implication being the last release y’all said was “game changing” is now “from a different century”.

Do you see it?

For this to be an accurate and true assessment means you were wrong both before and wrong now.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#268

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 ma…

I can bring data here: We recently did the first speed run where Louie.ai beat teams of professional cybersecurity analysts in an open competition, Splunk's annual Boss of the SOC. Think writing queries, wrangling Python, and scanning through 100+ log sources to answer frustratingly sloppy database questions: - We get 100% correct for basic stuff in the first half that takes most people 5-15 minutes per question, and…

is a competition/speed run a realistic example?

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason as why it's harder to solve a sudoku than it is to verify its correctness.

I should have made my post clearer :) There isn't one perfect solution to SQL queries against complex systems. A suduko has one solution. A reasonably well-optimised SQL solution is what the good use of SQL tries to achieve. And it can be the difference between a total lock-up and a fast running of a script that keeps the rest of a complex system from falling over.

If the current state of software is any indication, experts don't care much about optimization either.
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