[dotancohen]

If a structured language for querying databases already exists, why wouldn't one use that to query the database?

A tool that returns SQL from human language sounds great, but not one that runs the query unchecked. I speak four (human) languages, and sometimes I'll mistranslate something. Not to mention that this tool won't even bubble up the first two syntax errors that it generates - not very confidence inspiring.

[yoavm]

Because it's quite common for humans to speak English better than SQL?

The tool seems to show you the query that it executed, so people that do speak SQL can easily check it.

[simonw]

I'm very good at SQL. I still use LLMs to write queries for me on a daily basis because they are faster at it than I am, and I can very quickly review their work to check that they didn't make any mistakes.

Same applies for JavaScript and Python and Bash and AppleScript and Go and jq and dozens of other programming languages.

If you're going to use LLMs as a productivity boost you need to get good at quickly verifying that they've done the right thing. Effectively that means investing more in QA skills and habits, which is generally valuable anyway.

[lxgr]

Because it’s honestly quite bad and clunky by modern standards (I specifically miss composability of sub-query components, which makes every query like a throwaway effort), many people don’t enjoy learning it, and at least personally the likelihood of getting a given query right without doing lots of double checking is pretty low for advanced queries.

I do find it much easier to read/validate than to write though, which makes it an excellent application for LLM usage, in my experience.