The intermediate product of LLMs is still the Java or C or Rust or Python that came before them. English is not the intermediate product, as much as some may say it is. You don’t go prompt->binary. You still go prompt->source code->changes to source code from hand editing or further prompts->binary. It’s a distinction that matters.
Funny enough, that wasn't the case for me recently. I was working with an old database with no FKs and naturally, rows that pointed to nowhere. I was letting search.brave.com tell me what delete statement I needed to clean up the data given an alter table statement to create an FK.
It was just magically giving me the correct delete statements, but then I had a few hundred to do. So I asked it to give me a small program that could do the same thing. It could do the job for me, but it could not write the program to do the job. After about 30 minutes of futzing with prompts, it was clearly stuck trying to create the proper regex and I just went back to pasting alter tables and getting deletes back until the job was done.
There was no intermediate product. The LLM was the product there.
After about 30 minutes of futzing with prompts, it was clearly stuck trying to create the proper regex and I just went back to pasting alter tables and getting deletes back until the job was done.
If you're copying and pasting SQL statements, then SQL statements are the intermediate product. The fact that you didn't carefully review them and just ran them immediately is no different than an LLM producing Java source code that you shipped to the user without reviewing because it worked correctly in your limited testing. There's still an intermediate product that should have gone through the same software development robustness process that all source code should go through, you just didn't care to do it (and maybe rightly so if it's not super important).
There's no reason to be assmad. I know how to produce the sql statements in question. Being able to give the AI an example of what I wanted was part of the process. But doing hundreds of them is prone to typos. And cranking them out by hand is just slower. Especially when there are compound keys. Giving it to the AI just made the process faster.
But the AI could not, absolutely not, generate a program that could do what the AI was doing. Which would be really nice, because I'm probably going to go back through those hundreds of statements again in the future. The database is evolving, and my task is to migrate it to a whole new one. I would really rather have it give me a program. But it could NOT do that.
Comments
Funny enough, that wasn't the case for me recently. I was working with an old database with no FKs and naturally, rows that pointed to nowhere. I was letting search.brave.com tell me what delete statement I needed to clean up the data given an alter table statement to create an FK.
It was just magically giving me the correct delete statements, but then I had a few hundred to do. So I asked it to give me a small program that could do the same thing. It could do the job for me, but it could not write the program to do the job. After about 30 minutes of futzing with prompts, it was clearly stuck trying to create the proper regex and I just went back to pasting alter tables and getting deletes back until the job was done.
There was no intermediate product. The LLM was the product there.
If you're copying and pasting SQL statements, then SQL statements are the intermediate product. The fact that you didn't carefully review them and just ran them immediately is no different than an LLM producing Java source code that you shipped to the user without reviewing because it worked correctly in your limited testing. There's still an intermediate product that should have gone through the same software development robustness process that all source code should go through, you just didn't care to do it (and maybe rightly so if it's not super important).
There's no reason to be assmad. I know how to produce the sql statements in question. Being able to give the AI an example of what I wanted was part of the process. But doing hundreds of them is prone to typos. And cranking them out by hand is just slower. Especially when there are compound keys. Giving it to the AI just made the process faster.
But the AI could not, absolutely not, generate a program that could do what the AI was doing. Which would be really nice, because I'm probably going to go back through those hundreds of statements again in the future. The database is evolving, and my task is to migrate it to a whole new one. I would really rather have it give me a program. But it could NOT do that.