alt Hacker NewsYes. 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.
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Usually the term, "hard problem", is reserved for problems that require novel solutions
If you have 200 line SQL queries you have a whole other kind of problem.
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?
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.
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.