Comment by bartread
1 year ago
I get a lot of value out of ChatGPT but I also, fairly frequently, run into issues here. The real danger zones are areas that lie at or just beyond the edges of my own knowledge in a particular area.
I'd say that most of my work use of ChatGPT does in fact save me time but, every so often, ChatGPT can still bullshit convincingly enough to waste an hour or two for me.
The balance is still in its favour, but you have to keep your wits about you when using it.
Agreed, but the problem is if these things replace practitioners (what every MBA wants them to do), it's going to wreck the industry. Or maybe we'll get paid $$$$ to fix the problems they cause. GPT-4 introduced me to window functions in SQL (haven't written raw SQL in over a decade). But I'm experienced enough to look at window functions and compare them to subqueries and run some tests through the query planner to see what happens. That's knowledge that needs to be shared with the next generation of developers. And LLMs can't do that accurately.
Optimizing a query is certainly something the machine (not necessarily the LLM part) can do better than the human, for 99.9% of situations and people.
PostgreSQL developers are oposed to query execution hints, because if a human knows a better way to execute a query, the devs want to put that knowledge into the planner.
Tangent:
> PostgreSQL developers are oposed to query execution hints, because if a human knows a better way to execute a query, the devs want to put that knowledge into the planner.
This thinking represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the problem (query plan optimization).
Query plan optimization is a combinatorial problem combined with partial information (e.g. about things like cardinality) that tends to produce worse results as complexity (and search space) increases due to limited search time.
Avoiding hints won't solve this problem because it's not a solvable problem any more than the traveling salesperson is a solvable problem.
This is basically the problem with all AI. It's good to a point, but they don't sufficiently know their limits/bounds and they will sometimes produce very odd results when you are right at those bounds.
AI in general just needs a way to identify when they're about to "make a coin flip" on an answer. With humans, we can quickly preference our asstalk with a disclaimer, at least.