Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art

Posted on January 19, 2026 by way0utwest

I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece of ASCII Art. I have a screenshot here:

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For some reason, I thought, “I should do this in SQL”.” Then I thought, can the AIs help?

Let’s see.

This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.

SQL Prompt AI

My first instinct is to use Claude first, but here I decided to ask SQL Prompt AI for help. I generically asked for a function that would take a word as a parameter and then produce ASCII Art. I ended up with a function and a procedure. I won’t show all the code, but I ended up with this result.

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I thought this might be cutting off the message, but “Hello” produced “Helo”. So I asked SQL Prompt AI to alter the function to fix this. It tried, but it put a CTE in a subquery, which isn’t valid.

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I pasted in the error message, but it returned me advice, not new code.

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I suspected this might be because I had a few batches in this query window, so I copied just the function to another window, then pasted in the error and things got fixed.

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Claude

While SQL Prompt was working, I opened a tab for Claude and asked a question: I want a generic MSSQL function that returns ascii art for a character passed in

I got the results, which were good, but only for one letter. Good, but I realized I had done a poor job of specifying my intention.

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I then added another prompt to this chat: can I get a wrapper here that let’s me pass in a word and get the word returned as one result set?

This returned me a wrapper function with an explanation. The code is in my repo (linked below).

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When I tested this a bit, it worked well, including with spaces.

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Summary

I added this to my AIExperiments repo under the ASCII Art folder. You can check out the code and play if you want, or ask your own AI to do this.

This is a big waste of LLM compute, and really SQL Server core compute, but it’s fun. It was something I could have written, but how tedious is it to produce a function to do this? Even if I were to try and write an algorithm to produce letters from art, I could, but it’s not really worth the effort other than as an exercise to solve the problem.

This is also something I would guess many programming students work through. I haven’t had this, but I had to shuffle a deck of cards and other types of simulation exercises to help me learn to think in algorithms.

I do think working through algorithms is a good use of your time. It helps you think and learn and doing this will absolutely help you better judge the quality of other code, including that written by AIs.

However, I have done some of this work, and it’s not a good use of my time. Or likely the LLMs, but it was fun. I’ll likely use this in some Question of the Days in the future somehow.

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Simple Talks Podcasting in 2026

Posted on January 19, 2026 by way0utwest

I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this time ,I’m in Cambridge and at the Redgate office. Maybe sitting in the foyer alcove, playing a little guitar (like I did last Oct).

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I’m here for a week of Redgate meetings as we kick off the year and it’s good to see colleagues and friends. All of the advocates are here, including Pat Wright, our newest advocate, and we’re hoping to record a Simple Talks podcast episode this afternoon. Maybe a second one if I can get someone from our data team to come in on a Monday.

Part of this week will be some brainstorming and planning for the year and I’m wondering if there are things you’d like us four advocates (myself, Grant, Kellyn, and Pat) to cover and discuss. Any hot database topics or things you’d want to hear about?

Leave a comment for me if there are things you want to discuss. Otherwise, we’ll have to come up with things that we think might be of interest to you out there.

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No Defaults Passwords Ever

Posted on January 17, 2026 by way0utwest

I appreciate default passwords on systems. Often, for routers or other devices, I might need a way to connect initially. Or, if I perform a hardware reset, I want some password that I can use to reconfigure things. However, I am pretty good (not perfect, but really good) at changing those passwords to something else. It drives my wife slightly crazy at times, but I save the passwords and stick them in a manager I share with her periodically.

SQL Server doesn’t store a default password when you install it. If you enable the sa account, you need to create your own password. I primarily deal with containers, and I always set one, usually my own default. However, lots of software either allows a blank password or has a default password set on installation. Oracle even lists theirs in docs. That’s not the worst idea if sysadmins change them, but if they don’t, it’s a threat vector for attackers. I was working with a customer last year who had an Oracle database. I asked them to try a default user/pwd as a test and it worked. I think my head was slowly shaking for the rest of the call.

Recently, Silicon Valley saw the result of a default password not being changed when someone hacked the crosswalk signals and uploaded fake audio files that played when the signals changed. The vendor (not surprisingly) advised the city to change the passwords to something strong. A somewhat harmless prank, but it’s possible that someone might have made a more nefarious change.

It’s 2026. We know there are people out there with malicious intentions, as well as those whose prank goes sidesways and have unexpected side effects. There isn’t a good reason to keep default passwords anywhere, including in your own personal devices. These days, connectivity among many systems is a reality with network, Bluetooth, NFC, and who knows what other connections are possible. Your personal devices ought to have defaults changed for your own protection.

Inside organizations, it can be worse as the weakest link can be exploited to gain access to other systems. Quite a few hacks started in test systems and progressed to accessing production data. Even places we might not expect to be problematic, such as version control systems, have been used by hackers to gain access.

To me, finding a default password is worthy of a reprimand and a note in whoever’s file forgot to change it. A second offense ought to lead to a suspension at a minimum and possibly termination. This is such a low bar of required security that I can’t think of a good excuse to allow it anywhere.

Steve Jones

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Eight Minutes

Posted on January 16, 2026 by way0utwest

When I was at the Small Data 2025 conference, one of the speakers was talking about their work with AI technologies. This person uses it a lot in their day job, often to complete tasks that they would have struggled to work on in the past, mostly because of time constraints, but also a lack of resources. Sometimes this person has an idea, but doesn’t want to distract themselves or others by having them work on a side project.

During a recent ride in a Waymo (self-driving car), this person had their laptop out and running Claude Code. They gave it a prompt, asking it to build a small app for some data analysis. During the 8-minute ride, the agent had spit out the code, a Readme, and committed this to a git repo. Later, the speaker tried it and found it solved most of his requirements, and then did some other work on the project, as well as having Claude write more code to get something that was beyond a minimally viable app.

He then gave us this William Gibson quote: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I’ve thought about this quote a lot during the last few decades, especially as mobile phones and apps have become prominent. In Colorado, the bandwidth and connectivity have lagged behind other places. When I get frustrated with the mobile network, I want someone to put a copy of that quote above every developer’s desk at Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. so they realize the way things work in Silicon Valley isn’t how they work elsewhere.

I’ve been feeling that way about AI tech lately. It’s the future, and it’s not well distributed. There are some successes out there, among lots of failures, but I suspect that some of this is that we’re all working with unevenly distributed models, knowledge, and problems. Some of us are learning to use things better than others.

So I’m wondering, what do you think you could do in 8 minutes with a coding agent? Take a Waymo if you want, but you might be more comfortable with Claude Code (or another agent) at your desk. Take a problem you’ve been working on and give it to the AI agent. See what happens. Maybe even tackle a side project you can’t seem to find time on which to work and see what happens.

As I started this, I actually kicked off Claude Code and asked it to load some data from messy files into a database. Across a couple of days (I started late one afternoon), I estimate I spent 10 minutes approving actions, but for less than $5, I had a lot of data loaded (88 files) and the code to do it committed in a repo. With very little effort from me.

Think about what you could do in a few minutes with an agent. You might get something useful, with little effort or cost. It probably would not be a production-ready app, but it would be something to test an idea, or maybe some code that might inspire others to tackle some of their own backlog.

What do you want an agent to help you build?

Steve Jones

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