This is a bad use of AI

January 15, 2024


github.com/vanna-ai/vanna

AI tools excel in areas where an exact answer isn’t necessary (“draw a picture of a unicorn”) or where it’s easy to verify the correctness of the answer (“write a python script to download and merge some log files”).

This is neither.

The answers Vanna.ai gives you must be correct, and verifying the correctness requires you to parse and understand a poorly formatted SQL statement written by a computer. If you can already do that, you could just write it yourself from scratch.

Or, to quote Brian Kernighan:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

If Vanna.ai is writing SQL that’s more clever than what you could write, how are you ever going to be able to tell if it’s correct?

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