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Average is all you need

rawquery.dev

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Re: Average is all you need

#91

Post by Axel2Sikov »

underlines wrote: post #83

i fail to understand how text2sql on quite simple data sources is anything to write home about 3 years after it came onto the market? can someone elaborate? where it gets interesting is when you have a custom system that your LLM surely never saw (custom ERP) that has 50 sometime cryptic tables, unclear look up tables and unexplained flags. something no text2sql solution solved for us. we built a second mcp that lets…

There is a missundertanding. This is not text2sql. This is CLI first; ideally the tool being operated by Claude Code and alike.

You could use claude code for the "text2sql" kind of part, but this is not why this tool exists. Nor what the article advocates.

Re: Average is all you need

#92

Post by tqi »

> Claude doesn't ask you to define an attribution model. It doesn't open a whiteboard. It runs [query]"

Why is that a good thing? Claude didn't ask any obvious follow up questions, like what determined whether a user got an email or not? It is using the ab test terminology in Step 3 without any kind of confirmation that this is, you know, a valid test.

Re: Average is all you need

#93

Post by Bridged7756 »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #78
paulryanrogers wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I dont know what is the answer to the question "how do people do things they don't know how to do" ? The statue quo had been to learn SQL or ask a human you trust to check their own work, which hopefully you can reuse. Now it's ask AIs that are intentionally a bit random, and less likely to (or incapable of) check(ing) their work. Perhaps without seeing the SQL at all, requiring to trust it for every interaction…

If you think a language model can't check their work, then you are using the tools wrong. Plain and simple. Modern models are quite capable at surfacing and validating their assumptions and checking correctness of solutions. Oversight helps you build confidence in the solutions. Is it perfect, no.. but way better then most engineers I also ask to check things.

No they don't. To be able to "check one's work", implies that they can be held accountable, that they can tell apart right from wrong, when in reality they're merely text predictors.

If you think an LLMs can check their work, then you are doing a terrible job at writing software. Plain and simple.

They even go as far as "cheating", so tests fail, writing incorrect tests, or straight out leaking code (lol) like the latest Claude Code blunder. Is this the tool the original comment "is using wrong, plain and simple"? Or do you have access to some other model that works in a wildly different way than generating text predictions?

Re: Average is all you need

#94

Post by bluefirebrand »

chairmansteve wrote: post #86
jihadjihad wrote: post #33

> You did not write a single line of SQL. You did not set up an attribution model. You asked a question, in English, and got a table. But nobody bothered to check if it was correct. It might seem correct, but I've been burned by queries exactly like these many, many times. What can often happen is that you end up with multiplied rows, and the answer isn't "let's just add a DISTINCT somewhere". The answer is to look a…

Yes. The correct answer is to ask an SQL expert to write the query. An LLM will make the expert much faster at writing the script, maybe.

SQL is not hard enough to require an LLM to think about for you

I will never understand Engineers who struggle with SQL lookups. The vast majority of queries are extremely basic set theory

Re: Average is all you need

#95

Post by bluefirebrand »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #61
Axel2Sikov wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but… nobody said you didn’t had to check either(?).

How do you check if you don't have any other view into the data but SQL and you don't know SQL?

Sql takes at most an afternoon to learn enough of to navigate a database with

Re: Average is all you need

#96

Post by HWR_14 »

motoroco wrote: post #84
HWR_14 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, houses got better because materials got better. Windows are better. But the construction of the houses is worse. The precision of how the wood or material meets is worse (when cut at the site). There is a huge amount of sloppy work in modern construction.

this is not true in my experience. prefab kits of all sizes (from sheds to houses to barns, like were once possible to order from a Sears catalog) have worse tolerances than a carpenter working on site. you can measure 3 times and cut perfectly, and still end up with a few mm gap (or sometimes worse) after tiny errors accumulate as you assemble piece after piece. it _requires_ measuring as you go and cutting on site…

Correct about large scale kits. I had meant to head off the fact that preassembled pieces like windows have improved a lot, things that used to be assembled on-site but are now delivered as a unit or small kit.

Re: Average is all you need

#97

Post by [deleted] »

HWR_14 wrote: post #51
bluegatty wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good gosh no. That's like saying 'cars were better made in the 1950's because they used tons of steel'. Like they were 'heavier and more robust' - but that doesn't mean better. Foundations are way better, more robust, especially weatherized. Windows today are like magic compared to windows 100 years ago. What we do more poorly now is we don't use wood everywhere, aka doors, and certain kinds of workmanship are not th…

Yes, houses got better because materials got better. Windows are better. But the construction of the houses is worse. The precision of how the wood or material meets is worse (when cut at the site). There is a huge amount of sloppy work in modern construction.

[deleted]

Re: Average is all you need

#98

Post by bluegatty »

kaashif wrote: post #66
HWR_14 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, houses got better because materials got better. Windows are better. But the construction of the houses is worse. The precision of how the wood or material meets is worse (when cut at the site). There is a huge amount of sloppy work in modern construction.

I'm interested in how one would prove that one way or another. It seems to me that in the past there probably was lots of shoddy workmanship and just no-one paid attention to it. But I have no proof of that.

Fortunately, there are millions of buildings that remain standing as evidence of what was done in the past. So at least there's that!

Re: Average is all you need

#99

Post by krackers »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #94
chairmansteve wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The correct answer is to ask an SQL expert to write the query. An LLM will make the expert much faster at writing the script, maybe.

SQL is not hard enough to require an LLM to think about for you I will never understand Engineers who struggle with SQL lookups. The vast majority of queries are extremely basic set theory

The harder part is understanding the nature of the data you're working with. There's always some catch ("oh that field `foo` was never backfilled, so for queries before 2020 you have to recompute it by joining with legacyBar instead")

Re: Average is all you need

#100

Post by kaashif »

bluegatty wrote: post #98
kaashif wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in how one would prove that one way or another. It seems to me that in the past there probably was lots of shoddy workmanship and just no-one paid attention to it. But I have no proof of that.

Fortunately, there are millions of buildings that remain standing as evidence of what was done in the past. So at least there's that!

Massive selection bias - only the good quality ones remain standing, the low quality ones are not.

You have to get a representative sample, that's the tricky part.

So there's that!

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