Immigrants, They Get The Job Done
as I work with AI models, I keep getting The-emperor-has-no-clothes moments
I mostly use models 6 months behind AI Twitter where they spend money, chase clout
it's a "fast-follower" strategy, which offers natural immunity against hype
I parachute into occasional SOTA model use to spot-check my intuition
but spend very little $$ to sanity check, cross-check, and do budget-unconstrained deep dives
so I don't have to rely on extrapolation, but can actually explore more exhaustively, at leisure
these coding models are very capable at producing convincing output
and very convincing in their explanations of the choices they made
but their blind spots do not feel like 150 IQ professionals' blind spots. they are a 16 yo prodigy's blind spots
Technical discussion - skippable
I've been writing sql for >30 years. I can differentiate ~10 dialects, and know when to look up syntax when I've forgotten it
there's a common library called PostgREST that serves a REST API over Postgres. It doesn't allow native joins, but has an elegant and semi-magical workaround
the agents should know this well
I prefer an even smaller library called sqlite-rest, which provides a subset of PostgREST but on sqlite. no fancy JOIN magic
but I know from hacking in the TMTOWTDI1 era of computers, that a production JOIN is often homomorphic to a VIEW with subqueries. Note: not arbitrary JOINs, but certainly static JOINS
ref 1: discuss this concept with an AI
ref 2: discuss this concept with a non-tracking AI
the models surface-identify the NO JOINS rule, and down-weight choosing sqlite-rest because they naturally wrote JOINs in the project already
they delightfully and unironically mention a future path of "a duckdb-wasm page over a Parquet export"
it's so much like talking to a precocious 16 yo, more excited to do something flashy than a pedestrian, workman solution
Our apartment building has a super, a middle-aged Turkish guy who speaks broken English. When our dishwasher fell out of its mount, he said, "Aaah" and drilled two new screws into the cabinetry.
Total time spent assessing and fixing: 2 minutes
I feel like nobody is incentivized to train Immigrant AI
but society works better with lots of these guys running around, doing things, than weird alien intelligences trained to impress us
TMTOWTDI = There's More Than One Way To Do It, popularized by Larry Wall creator of Perl↩