No, Redgate Software isn't hiring for SQL Prompt. I'm sure quite a few of you depend on SQL Prompt and would like more engineers working on it. Maybe a few of you would find that an interesting piece of software to work on.

Rather, a Prompt engineer is someone that works with AI, trying to get a system to produce better results. I can't decide if this sounds like an interesting job that stretches your brain or the equivalent of a mediocre developer that just keeps copying something from Stack Overflow, hitting compile, getting an error, and repeating that cycle.

I can picture a scientist using their voice to continually correct some AI system by saying "no, that's not quite right. I want to see more blue" or some other type of guidance. Is this job the equivalent of raising a digital toddler?

I actually found one of these jobs on Indeed.com. For a company in San Francisco, a hybrid position paying between US$175k-335k to help create steerable AI systems. I'm not entirely sure what this is, but at that pay rate, it is tempting to learn.

I think AI systems are fascinating, especially for someone that has done some development and can see how difficult it would be to specify an algorithm that can handle some tasks. Like composing some prose result. Or suggesting code based on what you've typed. These are some handy features that have been added to some IDEs and services.

GitHub CoPilot is interesting, and if you haven't tried it, I think it helps Java/C#/app programmers. Go watch some videos or sign up for a trial. I am not sure about these helping us in database work. There is probably a little more work needed before an AI delivers help for your particular database issue. However, I'll be testing and working with some tools to see what I think.

If you are interested in AI and have a lot of patience to train models, and a lot of patience to work on data cleansing and loading, then maybe you can find a new career in AI. It might be a fad, but I don't think it will ever go away, and I do think there will be a lot of opportunities in this space in the next decade.

Note: If you find this interesting, I had a discussion recently with a few others in a webinar.