Voice of the DBA

Tag: software developmenmt

  • Learn to Code

    I thought this story about a programmer and a GenAI to be rather humorous. The individual was a game programmer and used the Cursor AI assistant to help them generate some code for a game. After a few hundred lines of code, the AI delivered this: “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.”

    That response makes me actually smile to myself and chuckle out loud. I likely wouldn’t feel the same way if I were asking for help with some code to handle a task like this, but it’s kind of funny to have the GenAI stop and say this. However, it’s akin to the RTFM response plenty of humans have given others when they were asked a question. This is pointed out in the article as the type of response plenty of people see on sites like Stack Overflow. Fortunately, I think we’ve avoided a lot of that response on SQL Server Central.

    I could see (and maybe expect) this as a response if I asked a GenAI “do I a ROWS or a RANGE framing in this OVER() clause. I should know the result I expect and the impact of those two options. However, if I asked for format of the statement or for an explanation of the difference, I’d expect an answer.

    I don’t know how widely this happens where the LLM stops helping, nor if there are any logs on why this happened. I could certainly guess some executives would want to know if the GenAI “thinks” that the user of the tool doesn’t really understand programming. Many managers might even want to query a GenAI to evaluate the humans using the tools.

    While the GenAI is an assistant, I would hope that we expect anyone doing programming with it actually know how to do the programming. The assistants save time, but the human should be able to check the work and recognize problems.

    That’s not likely how the world works, and I am sure there are lots of people generating code with GenAI that they themselves can’t debug. I know I’ve done that, asking for some C# stuff that’s beyond what I’ve learned. Fortunately, that’s not for my job, but just for fun or to experiment. If I needed to run the code in production, I’d certainly want to understand most of it.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Keep. It. Simple.

    I get a tech newsletter most days, which has news that I enjoy, but interspersed among the news and ads are projects, frameworks, or repos, most of which I’ve never heard of before. I used to read these, but it seems that there is an endless list of these, which all have marketing descriptions that somehow claim this set of code solves problems that others don’t or that this code is easy to use and integrate with, or well, I don’t know what other promises. I’m usually turned off by the end of the first sentence.

    The thing I’ve noticed is that there are so many projects out there. Even in the database space, if I happen to read a discussion on some aspect of databases, such as database deployment frameworks, I’ll see links to technologies I’ve never heard of in my life. Some are small projects, and some are small companies, but there is an amazing variety of solutions for any tech problem. I’m not sure most of them are much different from the others, but the Not Invented Here syndrome seems to be everywhere. These observations also remind me of just how vast the world is and how little I see of it on a daily basis.

    I ran across an article recently on simplifying the way we build software. In this instance, the authors focused on the complexity of JavaScript frameworks, with a number of authors/developers/consultants saying they limit their use of frameworks and try to keep to simple technologies. There is a quote that I find myself agreeing with and disagreeing with at the same time from David Heinemeier Hansson: “The merchants of complexity will try to convince you that you can’t do anything yourself these days. You can’t do auth, you can’t do scale, you can’t run a database, you can’t connect a computer to the internet. You’re a helpless peon who should just buy their wares. No. Reject.”

    I do think that many frameworks, products, etc. are very complex and there is a cost to using them. They can be overwhelming and hard to teach to others, and those costs can outweigh the benefits. The costs could be actual money or they could be the time it takes to learn, integrate, and teach the technology to others. Any change you make to your architecture will have impacts that you haven’t considered, and it will slow down your agility. Adding new technology does the same thing.

    At the same time, some things are hard. Auth is hard. Lots of people struggle with this and Troy Hunt has made a good living at https://haveibennpwned.com/ pointing out all the poor decisions people have made. Including a bunch of them that use the auth provided by some tech stack. Running databases is hard. Can you run one? Sure. Will you run it well as your app grows? Experience shows me most of you can’t. Can you set up a simple backup strategy? Of course, but that doesn’t matter. You being able to restore things is what matters. There are plenty more examples of tech problems or failures that companies run into as they build and scale software. There are also plenty of examples where using a framework saves a bunch of time for development teams. Look at mobile apps, most of them are based on some framework because learning all the ins and outs of iOS and Android is too hard for most people.

    For. Most. People.

    DNN can do a lot of things that most people can’t. He’s very talented and smart. Lots of organizations have one or two very talented people, but they also have a lot of average people. They struggle to teach and train them things, and ultimately, they don’t want to spend time teaching everyone about how to manage CSS or auth a user from a service or deploy changes to a database. They want a framework that makes it simple for the ever-changing staff to get work done related to their business, which is more often than not building software. They need to build software, but they need the software built to serve their customers in some way. That’s their goal, serving customers.

    I am all for keeping things simple. I want to minimize the number of technologies we use, and I want to limit the training time it takes to get people productive. However, I don’t want to build everything myself because I’m not sure I can, and I certainly know I don’t to go to that much effort.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.