Summary

Stancil argues that as AI shifts software work from writing code to “vibe and verify,” data work hits a harder wall because analysis can’t be validated by clicking around an app—verification still demands reading SQL or recreating results. The old tradeoff between write-friendly and read-friendly SQL now matters more than ever, creating a need for new representations that make queries legible—diagrams, explainers, or languages aimed at comprehension rather than generation.

Key Insight

AI can generate analytical code quickly, but until we have tools that make SQL easy to read and verify, analytics cannot fully join the “vibe and verify” revolution.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 5

  That reading and writing are not the same thing—and, especially, reading and writing code are not the same thing.

• 7

  In about a year, engineers went from mostly writing code, to reading code, to just testing code. Write and read, to vibe and verify.

• 5

  The far bigger problem, however, seems to be that there’s no way to know if the work is right.

• 4

  We need the opposite: Something that turns an arbitrary query into an accessible diagram.

• 7

  I want to ask a robot to write me any query I can think of, and a picture and some words that tell me how the big computer did numbers.

Tone

analytical, wry, and reflective