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Illustration of a person seen from behind in a dark corridor, holding a folder, looking through wired glass into a lit meeting room where four other people are using it.

The Understudy: A Story About the Human in the Loop

October 20, 2026
Pinal Dave
AI
AI, Best Practices, Developer, Professional Development

Fiction. The understudy is the person paid to stay ready. Every night a system settles millions of payments in seconds. Four times a year one person does the same work by hand, on paper, against the clock, so that the ability to do it still exists somewhere in the building.

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Cardinal Rules, a three panel cartoon by SQLAuthority. The VP suggests letting the AI run straight into production. The red bird is already typing DELETE FROM and Sam pulls the cable out of the wall. The bird says the WHERE clause was coming eventually.

AI in Production Without a WHERE Clause

October 17, 2026
Pinal Dave
AI
AI, DBA, SQL Delete, SQL Server Security

AI in production without a second pair of eyes is a quick way to lose a table. Cardinal was going to add the WHERE clause. Eventually.

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Figure from chapter three, a two by two grid with sounds sure and sounds unsure across the top and right and wrong down the side, with the sure and wrong square marked as the danger zone.

Why AI Sounds Confident When It’s Wrong

October 15, 2026
Pinal Dave
AI
AI, AI Book, Best Practices, Career Advice
Part three of ten. A wrong answer from a model sounds exactly like a right one. That single fact explains most of the damage AI does at work. Here are five interview answers that prove you already know it. Look at that grid for a second. Three of those four…
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Cutaway illustration of a factory line from IN to OUT, a dozen small hand cranked stations, and one station carrying an enormous chrome motor lettered NEW MOTOR.

AI Productivity Gains Went Up and Nothing Shipped Faster

October 13, 2026
Pinal Dave
AI
AI, Best Practices, Developer, DevOps, Software Development

AI productivity gains went up on every dashboard, and the release notes are the same length as last year’s. Writing code was never the constraint. Speed up one station and you get a taller pile in front of the station that is. Here is how to time your own line.

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Painted illustration of an empty meeting room, chairs pushed back from the table, one glowing laptop and a cold cup of coffee, with an old sprint plan still on the whiteboard and DO NOT ERASE written in the corner.

Tribal Knowledge: Nobody Left to Ask

October 12, 2026
Pinal Dave
AI
AI, Best Practices, Database, Developer

Tribal knowledge is the part of the job nobody writes down, and it leaves when the person leaves. I sat with a team that could not tell me whether they were allowed to change four lines of billing code. The assistant at the end of the table had read every line and could not say why those lines were there.

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Cardinal Rules, a three panel cartoon by SQLAuthority. The red bird asks what Sam is reading. Sam holds up a book cover and the bird goes quiet. The bird protests that it is right here, and Sam says that is the part the book is about.

AI Sounds Like Someone, But Nobody Is in There

October 10, 2026
Pinal Dave
AI
AI, AI Book, Best Practices, SQL Humor

AI sounds like someone, which is exactly why the checking stops. Cardinal read the cover of my book and has not recovered.

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Painting of five identical filing cabinets floating in dark space. Four are cold and sealed, one glows from a half-open drawer, and a brass plaque in front reads WHICH ONE IS REAL.

Text to SQL: The SQL Was Never the Hard Part

October 9, 2026
Pinal Dave
AI
AI, Best Practices, Database, Developer

Text to SQL works now, on real schemas, with joins and window functions. I watched three companies hand it to their business users, and all three quietly stopped. The SQL was never the hard part. The hard part is knowing which table is real and which meaning of the word you meant.

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