AI Read the Procedure Nobody Dares to Touch

AI read the procedure that everybody walks past. Nine hundred lines, no comments, one very old warning at the top.

Cardinal Rules. A Saturday cartoon about AI and databases.

Every shop has one. Nine hundred lines, no comments, a name like usp_ProcessFinal2, and a quiet agreement that nobody opens it during month end.

Cardinal can read it in a second, and this is the honest good news. A model is genuinely excellent at the mechanical part. It will tell you what the procedure touches, which tables it writes, where the cursor is, that the same table gets updated three separate times, and that one branch has been unreachable since a parameter default changed.

That is real work, and it used to take a careful afternoon. Ask for it. It is one of the best uses of AI in database work right now.

Then comes the part where the lights flicker. There is a clause that only fires on Tuesdays. Cardinal can describe exactly what it does and has absolutely no idea why it exists. The why was a promise made to a customer in 2011 by somebody who left in 2014. It is not in the code. It was never in the code.

So the procedure is not haunted by its logic. It is haunted by a decision nobody wrote down. Read the code with the machine, then go and find the one person who remembers the Tuesday, and this time write it in a comment with a date and a name on it.

Cardinal Rule

Code nobody understands is not an asset, it is a haunting.

The machine reads what the code does. Only people remember why.

Cardinal has refused to open the procedure again until November. On the desk this season: AI: Nobody’s in There. But we’re still in here. (on Amazon) and 100 AI Interview Questions and Answers for Data Professionals (Kindle, also on Amazon.in, paperback and audiobook).

Next Saturday, the VP announces that the AI says the backups are fine.

Ask the machine what the code does. Ask a person why it does it.

Published by Pinal Dave on SQLAuthority. More of my work at pinaldave.com.