[aurareturn]

Yes. To me, it is. Sometimes queries I give it are 100-200 lines long. Sure, I can solve it eventually but getting an "instant" answer that is usually correct? Absolutely priceless.

It's pretty common for me to spend a day being stuck on a gnarly problem in the past. Most developers have. Now I'd say that's extremely rare. Either an LLM will solve it outright quickly or I get enough clues from an LLM to solve it efficiently.

[Draiken]

You might be robbing yourself of the opportunity to learn SQL for real by short-cutting to a solution that might not even be correct one.

I've tried using LLMs for SQL and it fails at exactly that: complexity. Sure it'll get the basic queries right, but throw in anything that's not standard every day SQL into it and it'll give you solutions that are not great really confidently.

If you don't know SQL enough to figure out these issues in the first place, you don't know if the solutions the LLM provides are actually good or not. That's a real bad place to be in.

[navigate8310]

Usually the term, "hard problem", is reserved for problems that require novel solutions

[IgorPartola]

Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? One of the first examples in that book is how when you are disassembling a motorcycle any one bolt is trivial until one is stuck. Then it becomes your entire world for a while as you try to solve this problem and the solution can range from trivial to amazingly complex.

You are using the term “hard problem” to mean something like solving P = NP. But in reality as soon as you step outside of your area of expertise most problems will be hard for you. I will give you some examples of things you might find to be hard problems (without knowing your background):

- what is the correct way to frame a door into a structural exterior wall of a house with 10 foot ceilings that minimized heat transfer and is code compliant.

- what is the correct torque spec and sequence for a Briggs and Stratton single cylinder 500 cc motor.

- how to correctly identify a vintage Stanley hand plane (there were nearly two dozen generations of them, some with a dozen different types), and how to compare them and assess their value.

- how to repair a cracked piece of structural plastic. This one was really interesting for me because I came up with about 5 approaches and tried two of them before asking an LLM and it quickly explained to me why none of the solutions I came up with would work with that specific type of plastic (HDPE is not something you can glue with most types of resins or epoxies and it turns out plastic welding is the main and best solution). What it came up with was more cost efficient, easier, and quicker than anything I thought up.

- explaining why mixing felt, rust, and CA glue caused an exothermal reaction.

- find obscure local programs designed to financially help first time home buyers and analyze their eligibility criteria.

In all cases I was able to verify the solutions. In all cases I was not an expert on the subject and in all cases for me these problems presented serious difficulty so you might colloquially refer to them as hard problems.

[aurareturn]

It is not. It’s relative to the subject.

In this case, the original author stated that AI only good for rewriting emails. I showed a much harder problem that AI is able to help me with. So clearly, my problem can be reasonably described as “hard” relative to rewriting emails.

[m4rtink]

If you have 200 line SQL queries you have a whole other kind of problem.

[r0x0r007]

not unless you are working on todo apps.

[hshdhdhehd]

TODO: refactor the schema design.

[leptons]

What happens when these "AI" companies start charging you what it really costs to run the "AI"? You'd very likely balk at it and have to learn SQL yourself. Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess?

[hshdhdhehd]

Problem with this is people will accept tech debt and slow query's so long as the LLM can make sense of it (allegedly!).

So the craft is lost. Making that optimised query or simplifying the solution space.

No one will ask "should it be relational even?" if the LLM can spit out sql then move on to next problem.

[aurareturn]

So why not ask the LLM if it should be relational and provide the pros and cons?

Anyway, I'm sure people have asked if we should be programming in C rather than Assembly to preserve the craft.

[GoatInGrey]

Surely you understand the difference between not knowing how to do anything by yourself and only knowing how to use high-level languages?

[hshdhdhehd]

That is like using the LLM like a book. Sure do that! But human still needs to understand and make the decisions.