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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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One time at work I was tasked with writing a python script to compare two data sources. Like, you give it two CSVs and a primary key, and it tells you what data is in one but not the other, or mismatched, and so on. This worked fine and was in git, so anyone can use it.
My boss then asks if I can "put it on a website so anyone can use it".
This team has never done web development. Nothing for that is set up. Like, I could spin up a quick Django app or similar, but there's a lot of stuff to do and potentially fuck up.
I said "that sounds like a lot of research and ongoing maintenance costs. I think it'd be better to just check out and run the script"
Luckily for me he said "oh, okay"
Well it's been a research team and a five years...
Funnily enough this comic hasn't been true for a long time because of ML.
Well they did say it would be possible in 5 years ...
not hot dog
I had a boss who read an article about APIs and then came to me and ordered me to start using them. I said I would research it and he went away and never mentioned it again. This was in 2010.
Pretty sure he read the famous Bezos email ordering everyone to implement and use APIs in Amazon
No, he actually showed me the article later. It was remarkable because it never said what an API actually was, or even stated what the initials stood for. In my memory it seems like it was obviously written by AI, but it couldn't have been 16 years ago (as far as I know).
So uhhhh have you started using APIs yet?
Still researching.
I had a similar task and my boss wanted me to use ai to solve this.
There are solutions available for this already that work perfectly fine but whatever.
So i spent a whole day trying to get Copilot (because that is our great ai we are to use) to do what i wanted and ofc it kept failing catastrophic. Took me a few hours to even get it to load the files even.
I'm not too surprised. Over and over again I'm starting to puzzle together that the current crop of Agentic coding tools are "better than an intern, worse than an SME." By that I mean that the quality really can be anywhere between those two goalposts, often all at once, for no reason whatsoever.
I think the floor isn't "intern". I think the floor is "middle schooler".
Meanwhile, every job I'm looking at is saying "must be enthusiastic about AI" 😭
Yeah, nah good luck to those employers. Anyone they hire who’s enthusiastic about “ai” aren’t going to have great employees let alone any working code/products
A lot of these people are very good at selling their work And making it seem good and important. So exactly like an llm
Good guy manager trusts the person he pays to know this stuff to know this stuff.
This is a good point. He's not a bad guy. He's just not very technical, and sometimes that's frustrating.
My past managers would have said "I don't understand why it is so difficult, and I'm not open to learn"
How big were the CSVs? That sounds like a standard thing most spreadsheet apps can do already, unless the data size made traditional apps unusable.
The biggest ones I've seen are 1.2GB.
Why this company uses gigabyte CSVs is a separate problem.
(Also sometimes they want to compare a CSV to what's in a database, which the script can also do but I didn't mention in the post)
That makes sense. I have been asked to write a program that does a standard spreadsheet function on multiple occasions, so I was just curious. Sometimes people just don't know the tools at hand, want to offload their work, or think an over complicated workflow is a better workflow. I can see how it was actually useful in your case though.
I have an easier time doing that shit in powershell than I do in Excel which are the only tools I have available at work. I'm probably doing something wrong but I don't do it often enough to remember what that is. My PS script just works.
So a right/left join summary?