I received an email from a student recently who decided to cancel his membership, and he took the time to explain why. He was very respectful about it, and I genuinely appreciate where he's coming from. The short version is that he's been using AI more and more to help him with his Microsoft Access database. Instead of spending time searching for lessons, learning a technique, and then writing the code himself, he can explain what he wants to an AI and often have a working solution in a few minutes.

That raises a very reasonable question: if AI can help you get this stuff done, why should you keep paying for tutorials? My answer is that maybe you shouldn't. It depends entirely on what your goal is.

I'm here to teach people who want to learn how this stuff works. I teach Microsoft Access, database design, SQL, VBA, programming, and all the little nitty-gritty details that go along with them. Some of you want to become database developers. Some of you want to become programmers. Some of you are already developers and just enjoy learning new techniques. Some of you are retired but nerdy like me and just love learning this kind of stuff. You're the people I'm making these classes for.

But maybe you're an accountant who just wants a database to keep track of your clients. You don't care how an INNER JOIN works. You don't particularly want to learn VBA. You couldn't care less about normalization, recordsets, or the difference between a Long Integer and a Double. You just want the damn database to work so you can get back to accounting. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you can explain what you need to an AI and it builds something that works for you, fantastic. Use it.

I look at AI a lot like the autopilot in an airplane. Modern autopilot systems are amazing. They can handle an enormous amount of the actual flying, and modern aircraft can even perform automated landings under the right conditions. If your goal is simply to get from New York to Los Angeles, you don't need to understand aerodynamics, operate the control surfaces, or know what to do when an engine quits. You just want to get there.

But if your goal is to become a pilot, that's completely different. You want to understand why the airplane flies. You want to know what all those instruments mean and what happens when something goes wrong. If the autopilot suddenly stops working, you'd better know how to fly the airplane yourself. That's what my classes are about. I'm not here just to give you a finished database. I'm here to teach you how to build one.

Another good example is foreign languages. I have zero desire to learn another spoken language. One of the things I told myself when I moved to Florida 13 years ago was that I should learn Spanish because there are a lot of Spanish-speaking people around here. Turns out, as time goes on, I realized I have no desire to really learn Spanish. I communicate perfectly well in English. I've been to Spain. I've been to Greece. I've traveled to places where English isn't the native language, and if I need to communicate with someone and we don't share a language, I've got Google Translate. It might not make me sound like a native speaker, but it'll usually get the job done.

That's exactly what I want from it because I don't want to become fluent in Spanish. I want to order dinner, ask where the bathroom is, or figure out what the guy behind the counter is trying to tell me. But if learning Spanish were something I enjoyed, or if I wanted to live in Spain and really understand the language, then Google Translate wouldn't replace learning Spanish. It would become another tool I could use while learning it. That's how I see AI and programming.

And I want to be very clear about this because I don't want anyone thinking I'm trashing AI. Quite the opposite. I use AI all the time, and it's become an extremely useful tool in my daily work, especially when I'm working with technologies that aren't my particular area of expertise.

Just recently, for example, I worked with AI to build an MCP interface for my website. I knew very little about MCP going into it. AI helped me understand what I needed and helped me put the pieces together. But I already understand Visual Basic. I understand ASP, databases, and how web services work. So when AI gives me a chunk of code, I'm not blindly copying and pasting some mysterious incantation and hoping the computer gods are pleased with my offering. I can look at it and understand what it's doing, modify it, and integrate it into my existing system. When something doesn't work, I have enough underlying knowledge to figure out why.

That's incredibly important because AI still gets things wrong. I've had AI give me code for Microsoft Access that simply doesn't work. Sometimes it mixes up VBA with another flavor of Visual Basic. Sometimes it suggests a method that Access doesn't support. Sometimes it invents a property or command that sounds perfectly reasonable but doesn't actually exist. And the fun part is that it'll often tell you this nonsense with tremendous confidence.

I know when that happens because I've been working with Access for three decades. I can look at the answer and say, "Nope. Access doesn't work that way." If you don't know Access yourself, you might not know the difference. You might spend the next hour trying to figure out why perfectly reasonable-looking code doesn't work when the real answer is that the AI made something up.

That's one of the biggest reasons I still think learning the fundamentals matters, even if you plan to use AI for most of your actual work. The better you understand the subject, the better you are at using AI. You know what questions to ask, you can give it better instructions, and you can recognize when it's heading down the wrong path. You can take 80 percent of a solution that it gives you, throw away the 20 percent that's garbage, and adapt the rest to what you're actually doing.

AI can make an experienced developer dramatically more productive, and it can certainly make a beginner more productive too. But there's a danger in relying on it completely when you don't understand what it's building for you. Eventually you're going to reach a point where something breaks, the AI can't figure it out, and you don't even know where to start looking. That's the difference between having a solution and having knowledge.

And there's nothing wrong with only wanting the solution. That's the point I really want to emphasize. Not everybody who uses Microsoft Access wants to become a database developer, and not everybody who writes a little VBA wants to become a programmer. Maybe Access is simply the tool that runs part of your business. Maybe you need a customer database, an inventory system, an invoicing database, or something to keep your office organized. If AI can help you build that without spending hundreds of hours learning database development, great!

Use the tools that make sense for what you're trying to accomplish. Let the autopilot fly the plane. Let Google Translate order dinner. Let AI write some SQL. But understand that those tools are solving a different problem from education.

If you're the kind of person who looks at a database and wonders why it works, if you enjoy figuring out how tables relate to each other, if you want to understand SQL instead of just having AI write it for you, or if you actually enjoy programming and want to know what's happening underneath the hood, that's what I'm here to teach you.

AI doesn't make learning this stuff obsolete. In a lot of ways, I think it makes that knowledge even more valuable because now you've got an incredibly powerful assistant sitting next to you. The more you know, the more useful that assistant becomes, and the better equipped you are to recognize when it has absolutely no idea what it's talking about.

So the question isn't really whether AI can build your database for you. Increasingly, the answer to that is going to be yes. The better question is whether you just want the database or whether you want to know how to build it. Both answers are perfectly valid, but they're two very different goals.

My classes are for the people who want to learn how to fly the plane.

LLAP
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