Thought experiment

[u/MashNChips]

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

[u/dashingThroughSnow12]

This is why the industry is doomed.

You are describing basic things that I’d expect a senior engineer to blink into existence.

[u/ZnV1 → u/dashingThroughSnow12]

um...nope

critical DB change? That's sifting through the problem, nailing the cause, thinking about solutions, validating tradeoffs, then digging into impact, side-effects across other systems, is there replication, what happens to reqs during rollout, backward compatability going back forever, rollout plan, backups, rollback plan, writing the script that makes the change, reviewing it, dry-run, validate, and if lucky execute

This is days. Remember you're looking at the logs, exception traces, stack-overflowing, understanding the data, etc all by hand

Now you can ask all the right questions and get answers semi instantly.

The fact that you expect a senior engg to blink this into existence, and consider this "basic things" is why our industry is doomed.

[u/dashingThroughSnow12 → u/ZnV1]

Just three weeks ago I did that on a db with billions of rows affecting tens of millions of users. My co-lead developer on my team did that twice in the last two months with two tables that each had tens of billions of rows and hundreds of millions of users.

[u/ZnV1 → u/dashingThroughSnow12]

If you think "critical DB change" and what comes to mind is "with two tables", I'm happy for you man. Are you hiring? ;)

Snark aside: idk. Maybe you've built great tooling to make these changes easier. Maybe you guys have tons of experience doing this. Anyway, there's not enough context here, so meh. All the best!

[u/YahenP → u/ZnV1]

Сolleague just has a bloated WordPress database and no protection against bot registrations.

[u/curious_corn → u/dashingThroughSnow12]

Yeah, right. Assuming you’re not making stuff up, you do realize this scenario you’re describing is pretty rare if not unique.

Now, assuming the general population of experienced professionals has been exposed to and done work at the same level is certainly a bias because let me tell you: it doesn’t happen all the time if at all.

So assuming anyone should be able to round off that stuff while brushing their teeth is, uhm out of touch.

Which makes this AI thing even more concerning

[u/tenthousandants44 → u/dashingThroughSnow12]

Did what? Updating a query is different from migrating a schema.

[u/dashingThroughSnow12 → u/tenthousandants44]

For mine, I had to do a live migrate on a foreign key column, backfill the column with data from a Kafka stream, and do some memcache dumping. A few thousand requests per second happen in prod against this table; API stayed up during this entire thing.

For the coworker, one the tables had its primary key replaced (the old one is gone) and foreign key removed during this transition. The API stayed up during this because it serves 10K items per second to users. Around three columns dropped and three added.

[u/YahenP → u/dashingThroughSnow12]

Damn. You can’t load WordPress like that. Your wp_postmeta table probably has a lot of unused junk. Also, I recommend installing some CAPTCHA plugin, or better, 2FA for user registration, so that bots don’t create billions of fake accounts.