The Challenge of AI

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The Challenge of AI

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Points: 740440
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December 17, 2025 at 12:00 am

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David.Poole SSC Guru Points: 76325 More actions · Answer 1

I find AI provides me with 80% of what I need. As a data engineer, this is fantastic. I can't think of a programming aid that can boast the same thing.

The missing 20% is for me to resolve. This makes more productive use of my time, but with a big caveat. The items in that 20% are the trickier ones; the frustrating and stressful ones. Before AI, the mix of 80% straightforward and 20% stressful stopped me from getting burnt out. Now that the stressful 20% represents 100% of my world. I'm so tired, boss!

I am fortunate in that our CEO has spent 15 years working in the AI space. He showed us how he uses AI, and that helped enormously. It seems that most people receive an imperial decree to use AI with threats if they refuse.

There was an article this morning from someone who had worked in the AI space at IBM and AWS. She mentioned that most people using AI are doing so to help phrase an email more professionally or as a glorified search engine. That will never realise the potential of AI, but if you have never been shown how best to use it, then what do they expect?

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Grant Fritchey SSC Guru Points: 399363 More actions · Answer 2

Having just successfully built a functional application using only prompts and agentic AI, dbRosetta if anyone is interested, I have to say, currently, this thing isn't going to replace me. It absolutely enhances what I can do though. Everything was so much faster. Just, it also made mistakes, just like humans. It left a password in a file stored in clear text, other stuff. There has to be a guiding hand. However, how many guiding hands do you need?

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt

Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 740440 More actions · Answer 3

Lol, I usually need a couple of guiding hands to ensure juniors stay on task. However, they also help me get work done without me having to do all the work.

Need to read that series. I've been interested in trying something like that myself.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 740440 More actions · Answer 4

David.Poole wrote:

I find AI provides me with 80% of what I need. As a data engineer, this is fantastic. I can't think of a programming aid that can boast the same thing.
The missing 20% is for me to resolve. This makes more productive use of my time, but with a big caveat. The items in that 20% are the trickier ones; the frustrating and stressful ones. Before AI, the mix of 80% straightforward and 20% stressful stopped me from getting burnt out. Now that the stressful 20% represents 100% of my world. I'm so tired, boss!
I am fortunate in that our CEO has spent 15 years working in the AI space. He showed us how he uses AI, and that helped enormously. It seems that most people receive an imperial decree to use AI with threats if they refuse.
There was an article this morning from someone who had worked in the AI space at IBM and AWS. She mentioned that most people using AI are doing so to help phrase an email more professionally or as a glorified search engine. That will never realise the potential of AI, but if you have never been shown how best to use it, then what do they expect?

80/20 is a good measure, and it also means that you need to judge the 20% yourself. That's where experience matters, and where I think a few of the predictors about how AI will replace people will fall short.

I certainly think we don't have enough examples of how to use AI and get things done effectively.

David.Poole SSC Guru Points: 76325 More actions · Answer 5

I can remember being amazed when PyCharm allowed me to rename a method on a class and it automatically updated my entire codebase with that alteration and did it correctly.

I recently upgraded DBT and SQLFluff. The upgrade of SQLFluff added a lot of new linting rules for SQL, and the old code base failed these rules miserably. A few of them were commonly used subqueries that, without an alias for the table, could be confusing.

I started to refactor the code, and after the 1st two occurrences, Co-Pilot recommended the other fixes. It got overzealous in its pattern matches, but it did reduce a day's worth of effort down to a few minutes.

For some of the work I do, co-pilot is like auto-complete on steroids. When I want to add a description to a table, view or column, it makes a damn good guess as to what the description should be.

This may not be what those hyping AI think of as a good use, but the accumulation of time savings soon adds up

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Doctor Who 2 SSCrazy Eights Points: 8241 More actions · Answer 6

This is the most vexing questions of our time. I honestly don't know what to think. I like to think that Satya Nadella is right. That AI will lead to more hirings and new jobs. But I can't escape the fact that he and other leaders at Microsoft have laid off thousands of people this year at Microsoft. It almost seems like he's saying one thing but doing another. That makes me uncomfortable.

Where I work our CISO has banned all AI, GenAI, etc. This is hurting all of us. Many people will not be able to use AI and gain experience at this new and necessary technology. That angers me and makes me fearful for my future. I try to compensate at home, by paying for some of the tools my employer denies all of us. But, I haven't the resources to utilize anything more than one tool, which isn't what many of you are allowed to use.

This is a troublesome time for me, due to circumstances beyond my control.

Rod