Average Is All You Need
by AlexC04 on 4/13/2026, 4:36:42 PM
https://rawquery.dev/blog/average-is-all-you-need
Comments
by: drfloyd51
If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves?<p>Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with?<p>Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
4/17/2026, 12:28:08 PM
by: utopiah
This is yet another ad, it's tiring.<p>It's a post claiming average AI is useful... by a for-profit "data platform with a CLI that LLM agents can use directly". What are they going to do? Criticize the whole industry they are selling to?
4/17/2026, 1:12:42 PM
by: winterbloom
how do you know those queries are actually correct without domain knowledge?<p>Do you know enough about JOINs and how they work to be able to break those big queries down and figure out whether they are doing exactly what you're asking for in English?
4/17/2026, 12:52:46 PM
by: montroser
This tracks. Tasks that used to be a day or two of grunt work are now an hour with Claude.<p>And there is a lot of that type of work to do if you're trying to grow a business. But, <i>something</i> in there should be trying to be <i>exceptional</i> or else you have no moat. Claude will probably not be able to breeze through that part with the same amount of ease...
4/17/2026, 12:36:30 PM
by: tsimionescu
> But this is a pain, first because, if you do anything that is not selling a product online that people can buy right when they click a button, it is a drag to create those attribution models effectively: is it last click, first click, weighted attribution... who knows. Nobody knows. Everybody gives up and just adds it to a dashboard and pretends it makes sense.<p>Yes, thinking about your data and how to check it is so annoying. Much better to do something average, see if the result puts you in a good light, and share that insight into your company's working with ~~everyone on the internet~~ your boss.<p>Rarely have I seen "we help you create meaningless slop more easily" advertised so explicitly. Or is this also average?
4/17/2026, 12:51:00 PM
by: segh
Being average is a just stage LLMs pass through as AI makes its way towards 'expert' and 'super human' levels.
4/17/2026, 12:59:40 PM
by: montroser
Average is all you need, if your needs are average.
4/17/2026, 12:32:04 PM
by: bashwizard
The majority of devs are average. What a shocker.
4/17/2026, 12:43:24 PM
by: throwaway98797
adding LLMs to the incompetent doesn’t transform them<p>if anything it makes the world more dangerous<p>a reckoning is coming<p>the top decile will be janitors for the rest
4/17/2026, 12:59:14 PM
by: JackSlateur
Average is all we need ! I mean, working 50% is enough, right ?<p>A car that starts 50% of the time ?<p>A plane that stops on 50% of the flights ?<p>A pacemaker that beats only 50% of the time ?<p>David Goodenought said that average is enough ..
4/17/2026, 12:30:24 PM
by: mpalmer
<p><pre><code> This is not only average. This is actual magic. So let's be real: the SQL is average. The joins are average. The chart is average. And that took us less than 5 minutes and that was amazing, that is the entire point. You did not need a data engineer to model your HubSpot data, or a meeting to agree on whether it should be last-click or first-click or linear or time-decay or whatever. You needed a query, written fast, on data you already own. Your LLM wrote it. You confirmed it made sense. Your manager got a link. Honestly, average is clearly magic; prove me wrong. </code></pre> I'll give it a go. This is generated slop, and the poor, factory-made quality of the writing undercuts every aspect of the argument.<p>It is like nails on a chalkboard.
4/17/2026, 12:34:53 PM
by: throwaway613746
[dead]
4/17/2026, 12:44:23 PM