> AI tools are akin to having a junior developer working for you. Except they are much much faster.
Honestly, this is brilliant. The other day I had to add table name prefixes to a SELECT statement column aliases, since such a feature just doesn't exist for some reason, a bit like:
-- fails because of duplicate column names (e.g. when creating a view)
SELECT
*
FROM table_a
JOIN table_b ON ...
JOIN table_c ON ...
...
-- this would solve my issue, if WITH_PREFIX did exist (or anything like it)
SELECT
table_a.* WITH_PREFIX 'table_a',
table_b.* WITH_PREFIX 'table_b',
table_c.* WITH_PREFIX 'table_c'
FROM table_a
JOIN table_b ON ...
JOIN table_c ON ...
...
So I just gave ChatGPT the schema definitions/query and it wrote out the long list of like 40 columns to be selected for me, like:
SELECT
table_a.id AS 'table_a_id',
table_a.email AS 'table_a_email',
...
table_b.id AS 'table_b_id',
table_b.start_date AS 'table_b_start_date',
...
and so on. I haven't found another good way to automate things like that across different RDBMSes (different queries for system tables that have schema information) and while it's possible with regex or a bit of other types of text manipulation, just describing the problem and getting the output I needed was delightfully simple.
Aside from that, I just use the LLMs as autocomplete, which also encourages me to have good function naming, since often enough that's sufficient information for the LLM to get started with giving me a reasonable starting point. In particular, when it comes to APIs or languages I haven't used a lot, but the problems that I face have been solved by others thousands of times before. I don't even have to use StackOverflow much anymore.
That's why I bought Copilot (though JS/HTML autocomplete in JetBrains IDEs is visually buggy for some reason) and use ChatGPT quite a lot.
LLMs are definitely one of my favorite things, after IntelliSense (and other decent autocomplete), codegen (creating OpenAPI specs from your controllers, or bootstrapping your EF/JPA code from a live dev database schema), as well as model driven development (generating your DB schema migrations/tables from an ER model) and containers (easily packaged, self-contained environments/apps) and smart IDEs (JetBrains ones).