The experience that made me hate programming, but that's all on me

Programming@programming.dev – 127 points – 3 weeks ago

Title before edit: I hate programming, why did i choose this field

TL;DR: Stupid mistake, made by hours waste.

Basically, I was extracting date from the SQL db, and it was not displaying. I tried everything, heck I even went to chatgpt, and copilot. Two and half hours of trying every single thing under the sun, you know what was the issue?

SELECT task, status, id FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id

I FUCKING FORGOT TO ADD 'date' TO THE DAMN QUERY. TWO AND HALF HOURS. I was like, "Ain't no way." as I scrolled up to the query and there it was, a slap in the face, and you know what was the fix?

SELECT task, status, date, id FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id

Moral of the story, don't become a programmer, become a professional cat herder instead.

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The reason the date is not in the output is because you didn't include a date column in your SELECT statement.

If you want to include the date in the output, you'll need to add a column that contains the date to your SELECT statement. For example, if you have a column named "created_at" or "date" in your mainWorkSpace table, you can add it to your SELECT statement like this:

SELECT task, status, id, created_at FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id

This will include the created_at column in the output of your query.

🤷 Gpt, first try. I don't know what you asked.

Ah I see ChatGPT is being as accurate as ever making up a created_at field completely unprompted. They've already found the correct SQL:

SELECT task, status, id, date FROM mainWorkSpace WHERE user_id = @user_id

Although I would question the sense in calling a date field "date".

Well I have to defend it here, it explicitly stated

if you have a column named "created_at" or "date"

But yeah anyhow anyone should be able to figure the own solution out with this. Nonwithstanding that if you need gpt for this, you might not have a good time in general.

ChatGPT rightly assumed you wouldn’t use a reserved word in your schema

Perhaps, but we don't know and therein lies the problem.

It pointed out the exact problem immediately and would have saved hours of effort.

But yeah, it didn't know the name of the column and guessed at what it would be.

It made an incorrect inference, imagine how wrong it is on more complex questions.

Of course. I would not recommend using it.

More like giving hints or a rough frame to work with.

Umn. No. It told you it was making that inference since it didn't know the table schema.

For example, if you have a column named “created_at” or “date” in your mainWorkSpace table, you can add it to your SELECT statement

Otherwise it was exactly right about the problem.

It's partially right but led OP down the wrong lines of thinking because it interpreted the prompt as a date field being missing rather than the field named date being missing.

Tbh I don't blame it too much here as there is kind of a base level of understanding requred to use it successfully.

No. In what way is "If you have a column named foo add it to your query" wrong?

I pasted my code multiple times and didn't give me that answer. Maybe it's because you only copied the query and not the code that i wrote.

I also posed the question why I don't get a date in the output of course.

I was talking about this date which was used to display the date assigned by the user, but the column was not displaying with the date because I wasn't asking sql for the date (if you've looked at the query), so yeah, a stupid mistake caused for a stupid angry post.