this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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As one example I built an MCP server that lets LLMs access a reporting database, and made a Copilot Agent and integrated it into Teams, so now the entire business can ask a chat bot questions, using natural language in teams, about business data. It can run reports for them on demand, pulling in new columns/tables. It can identify when there might be something wrong as it also reads from our logs.
These people don’t know databases. They don’t know how to read debug/error logs.
I also use GitHub copilot.
But sure, it can’t be of any help to anyone ever lol
I’ll take your word for it to not just be saying “no” but I still have to wonder why it needs “AI” and if people are going to build up a reliance on it to the point where they start to not be able to find that info on their own. I mean, hell, like you say they already can’t handle the databases so why are they even fucking around in there anyway/why aren’t they learning how to use them if they’re so important for their jobs?
Because in teams you could type (or say) "how many customers are still awaiting their refunds for their services that were cancelled last week?" and it will go and do its little AI magic and respond with the answer.
But they can never find it on their own - it's in a database, they have to use some tool to get it. Why can't that tool be AI?
They're not! That's the point. This way it gives them access to information that they would usually have to put in a support ticket, or run multiple reports and then try and compile them together, for example, to get. Now they can just ask a bot in teams a question and they get the answer.
Because their job isn't to access the production database.
So you can’t have a foolproof spreadsheet that just has an option for “refund given” with a date range? Why go through all this AI nonsense? All it’s doing is adding points of failure and giving people the ability to fuck up their prompts.
A spreadsheet? No, sales go through the database. That was also just an example. You could ask it to see which state has the most sales of product X between dates Y and Z for customers between age 18 and 25, as another example. You can ask it anything you can think of to do with the data.
It’s basically a reporting engine that can create ad-hoc reports at will.
It’s a lot easier to write a prompt for a report than it is to query the database, especially when you don’t know SQL etc - or even have access to the database.
Product X > filter by state > date range. Why is this difficult? Gimme another, it’s mildly entertaining even if it’s not exactly difficult.
What product are you using to get that data from a live Azure database?
You literally told you built something which would allow an LLM to access the data. In order to be reliable enough the data would have to be appropriately sorted already and there would need to be an interface which the LLMs could use. So you built all this stuff to let the LLM thing work and now you’re looking at me stupid like building an extreme simple filter is some sorta crazy thing and we need a product to do it.
What the hell were people doing before you built your little chatbot? Just neatly sorting information into a black box and throwing into the ocean?