Why I Can’t Disappear Into Books Anymore — The Attention Crisis of 2025

Lately, it feels like everything is moving too fast.

Every other day there’s a new AI tool that can write code, analyze data, even explain things better than most tutorials. You type a simple prompt, and within seconds it gives you a full SQL query. Clean, Structured and ready to use.Not only for SQL for all other data and programming languages.

So naturally, a question starts to creep in.

If AI can already do it faster than me, what’s the point of struggling through joins, group by, and all those little details that used to matter so much?

then I’ve thought about this too.And honestly, I almost convinced myself that maybe SQL is becoming one of those “nice to have” skills. Something that used to be essential, but now… maybe optional.

But the more I sit with it, the more I realize that’s not really true.

Because the problem isn’t writing SQL. That part has become easier.

The real problem is knowing whether what you’re looking at actually makes sense.

AI will give you an answer. It always does. But it doesn’t really know your data. It doesn’t know that one table has duplicates that shouldn’t be there, or that a column name is misleading, or that a certain filter quietly removed half the story. It just gives you something that looks right.

And “looks right” is a dangerous thing when you’re working with data.

There’s this quiet shift happening. Before, being good at SQL meant you could build complex queries from scratch. Now, it feels more like being good at SQL means you can read something whether AI wrote it or a teammate did and immediately feel when something is off. That instinct doesn’t comes from understanding. And that understanding still comes from SQL. Another thing I keep noticing is that, despite all the new tools, SQL never really goes away. It just hides a little better. You see it inside dashboards, behind data pipelines, inside tools that claim to be “no-code.” But underneath, it’s still there, doing the same job it always did — moving, shaping, and answering questions about data. So even if you’re not writing it line by line all day, you’re still relying on it. And maybe that’s the real point. I don’t think SQL is going anywhere. It’s just changing its role. It’s becoming less about typing… and more about thinking. And if you’re just starting out, that might actually be a good thing.

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