• Leon@pawb.social
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    20 hours ago

    A SQL (sequel) query is a way to ask a database for information. A database consists of tables (think sheets in excel) where each table has rows and columns. Rows are individual entries, and columns are properties on each entry. So you could have a “booking” entry with say, a “date” and a “customer.”

    Excel and databases can be presented (and in many ways function) in very similar ways, as a developer the amount of times I’ve written software to shift work away from an Excel document into something more approachable and generalised… honestly it’s like most of what I do. Last year I developed an entire scheduling and follow-up application that was previously one person organising a bunch of people via an excel document. It was a fun project, the person was really fun to work with and super engaged with things.

    Anyway, a query is almost plain English.

    SELECT Customer, Date FROM Booking
    WHERE Date BETWEEN  '2025-11-15' AND '2025-11-30'
    ORDER BY Date ASC
    

    This is just an example, what I did was a little bit more complicated, but not by a lot. The LLM just decided to randomly change the verbs and add in random columns that didn’t exist. Completely unprompted, almost like autocorrect gone haywire.

    Between the environment being a slow mess, and the LLM screwing me over, what would’ve normally taken ~5-10 minutes took over an hour. I don’t see how it’s supposed to improve productivity.