James Cowling

We ran out of time to make an educational podcast episode so made a reaction video instead. Engagement bait at its finest

Bad decisions aren’t just for agents! Sometimes you can make artisanal hand-crafted bad decisions all on your own too.

If you're treating your database as a global namespace you're doing it wrong. This is what folks often end up with when they start using SQL and it leads to immense complexity when different parts of a giant codebase are all changing each other's data. If you're using triggers or cascading deletes there's a good chance you're there already.

Good database architecture is modular. If you need to do some user operations you should be calling a user module, not writing a SQL statement against it. This is what any sane large codebase looks like but LLMs still get this wrong all the time.

Of course you could just use something like Convex where queries are code and this is built into the API. It also has components with sub-transactions so a module can call another module without violating transactionality.

Agentic development is incredible and also, at the limit, completely commoditized. All that’s left is your judgement and critical thinking. I think it’s worth practicing that very deliberately these days.

Nice try busses I still see you