A car that starts 50% of the time ?
A plane that stops on 50% of the flights ?
A pacemaker that beats only 50% of the time ?
David Goodenought said that average is enough ..
The Business simply cannot admit that it’s really doing nothing above average. If they did, investment dries up.
This is not only average. This is actual magic.
So let's be real: the SQL is average. The joins are average. The chart is average. And that took us less than 5 minutes and that was amazing, that is the entire point.
You did not need a data engineer to model your HubSpot data, or a meeting to agree on whether it should be last-click or first-click or linear or time-decay or whatever.
You needed a query, written fast, on data you already own. Your LLM wrote it. You confirmed it made sense. Your manager got a link.
Honestly, average is clearly magic; prove me wrong.
It is like nails on a chalkboard.
And there is a lot of that type of work to do if you're trying to grow a business. But, something in there should be trying to be exceptional or else you have no moat. Claude will probably not be able to breeze through that part with the same amount of ease...
Yes, thinking about your data and how to check it is so annoying. Much better to do something average, see if the result puts you in a good light, and share that insight into your company's working with ~~everyone on the internet~~ your boss.
Rarely have I seen "we help you create meaningless slop more easily" advertised so explicitly. Or is this also average?
Do you know enough about JOINs and how they work to be able to break those big queries down and figure out whether they are doing exactly what you're asking for in English?
if anything it makes the world more dangerous
a reckoning is coming
the top decile will be janitors for the rest
I think you can have LLMs do that too, and then generate synthetic training data for "high-effort code".
Part of the problem is that better code is almost always less code. Where a skilled programmer will introduce a surgical 1-3 LOC diff, an incompetent programmer will introduce 100 LOC. So you'll almost always have a case where the bad code outnumbers the good.
/end extreme over optimism.
The question is, do we have good enough feedback loops for that, and if not, are we going to find them? I would bet they will be found for a lot of use cases.
It's a post claiming average AI is useful... by a for-profit "data platform with a CLI that LLM agents can use directly". What are they going to do? Criticize the whole industry they are selling to?
Pass.
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 at the base table and the joins. You're joining customers to two (implied) one-to-many tables, charges and email_events. If there are multiple charges rows per customer, or an email can match multiple email_events rows, it can lead to a Cartesian multiplication of the rows since any combination of matches from the base table to the joined tables will be included.
If that's the case, the transactions and revenue values are likely to be inflated, and therefore the pretty pictures you passed along to your boss are wrong.
Further reading, and a terrific resource:
https://kb.databasedesignbook.com/posts/sql-joins/#understan...
> ninety percent of everything is crud
When it comes to bs dashboard where "average is all you need", maybe the "better than average" result would be asking yourself if it's even worth doing in the first place?
It makes me wonder if Hacker News has a silent majority of people who would actually use AI in this way without wanting to admit it, and a vocal minority of people who wouldn't.
Not all context is documented, and some context has to even be changed because it doesn't make sense.
I find AI very useful, but I think a lot of this AI SQL products are misleading.
drfloyd51•1h ago
Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with?
Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
CodeyWhizzBang•1h ago
I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.
sva_•1h ago
s/average/median
jagged-chisel•52m ago
wongarsu•52m ago
But it is useful to question whether that is true in all cases. The cases that aren't normal-distributed might be exactly the cases where it pays off to be neither average or median
programjames•41m ago
jerf•34m ago
How stable that is on the long term, I don't know any more than the next guy, but it is where I'm contributing now.
bluegatty•32m ago
HWR_14•28m ago
roenxi•31m ago
The people who need to be above average and exceptionally are senior management and maybe a few bright sparks in middle management. Most of the value-add happens there that builds social machines that then do the work.
> If average is all we need, then anyone can do it.
Pretty much, yes. That is why the range of salaries on offer is pretty compressed compared to the range of returns capitalists get.
j45•23m ago
analog31•15m ago
raw_anon_1111•11m ago
No one has ever differentiated themselves based on how good of a ticket taker they are. Coding especially on the enterprise dev side where most developers work has been being commoditized since 2016 at least and compensation has stagnated since then and hasn’t come near keeping up with inflation.
In 2016, a good solid full stack, mobile or web developer working in the enterprise could make $135K working in a second tier city. That’s $185K inflation adjusted today. Those same companies aren’t paying $185K for the same position.
My one anecdote is that the same company I worked for back then making $125K and some of my coworkers were making $135K just posted a position on LinkedIn with the same requirements (SQL Server + C#) offering $145K fully remote.