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BK Brian Kernighan On The Developing Dev

“I've been using mostly Claude, but others as well to generate SQL because I'm not an SQL expert. … How do I know whether it gave me the right query? Because I'm not an SQL expert. And if we already knew the answer, we wouldn't need it. And so I'm wrestling with that. And my observation is 90% of the time it generates a perfectly fine query and 10% of the time it gives you a totally wrong answer. And I don't know which is which.”

The Developing Dev · Software Engineering & Infra · October 2026

“I've been using mostly Claude, but others as well to generate SQL because I'm not an SQL expert. … How do I know whether it gave me the right query? Because I'm not an SQL expert. And if we already knew the answer, we wouldn't need it. And so I'm wrestling with that. And my observation is 90% of the time it generates a perfectly fine query and 10% of the time it gives you a totally wrong answer. And I don't know which is which.” — Brian Kernighan, The Developing Dev

Context

Asked how it feels to watch hand-written code become obsolete, Kernighan describes generating SQL from plain-English questions for a colleague who isn't a programmer. The problem is checking the output: you need domain expertise, and then a way to check the checker.

Transcript

The Developing Dev
Brian Kernighan

…Large language models explain this. What's that mean? What's the future going to be? And so that paradigm shift, I think, is really, really, really uncertain. And we are very much in the middle of it. And everybody knows about it. So anyway, now I've given you the synopsis of the book. Go by it.

Ryan Peterman

…sad for them to see these things become obsolete, like typing things out and stuff. I was curious, in your career in computing, there must have been points where something became obsolete, maybe like the punch cards or I don't know, something like that. And I guess, how did you feel at that time?

Brian Kernighan

…to generate it for you? I don't think so. I don't think that at all. And even once the program is generated for you, you still have to see whether it works and whether it's the most effective way to do what you want. And is it really doing what you want or should you have wanted something different and all of those sorts of things? And that's in an environment where you know what you're doing. I've been using mostly Claude, but others as well to generate SQL because I'm not an SQL expert. And I have a colleague over at the Institute for Advanced Studies who has a database. She's not a programmer at all, but she wants to query her database effectively. So I need something to generate SQL from natural language queries. So I want to say, give me all of the whatever's that have this property and get the large language model to generate the SQL and then run it through the database.…

Ryan Peterman

It sounds like what you're saying is you need some domain expertise. Otherwise, you can't be the judge of if it's.

Brian Kernighan

You need domain expertise. Probably it's the same domain expertise you always needed. You need ways of validating what you do because you can't be sufficiently expert that you can test a big program all by yourself. So you need something AI again. To help you with generating the test, but then you…

Ryan Peterman

In the world you described, which is today's world, the models are not perfect. There's a lot of subtleties where they get things wrong. But in a world where they are perfect and they're kind of doing everything, what just like out of curiosity, what happens to a computer science major?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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