AI row count estimates arrive with tremendous confidence. Cardinal said four hundred. The query returned nine million.
The fog after a layoff shows up before the grief does. You can’t read, you can’t decide, and you can’t find the words to tell the people you love. It isn’t weakness, and it lifts. These are small rules for the first 30 days, and the signs that it’s time to talk to someone.
The Erdős unit distance problem asks how many pairs of points can sit exactly one unit apart. Paul Erdős guessed the answer in 1946, and the guess stood for eighty years. In May 2026, an OpenAI model found a counterexample. I checked the grid trick behind it in SQL Server, spatial queries included.
AI generated ETL ran clean on the first try, and it took six weeks to find out what it was missing. A late Monday file, a file sent twice, a file full of zeros and mangled names all got through. The ugly old job had a rule for every one of them, and nobody had written those rules down. Now I ask AI for the failure list before I ask for any code.
