So I got the email about Claw's new "Pro" tier. The big headline is this "cost optimizer" feature. You know the drill: it promises to analyze your queries and suggest "more efficient" versions to save on compute credits.
Here's the thing that's already giving me side-eye: it's not a separate tool or a report you run. It's baked into the query execution layer itself, and it *passively* suggests optimizations *after* the query runs and you've already been charged. So you pay for the "bad" query, then get a little note saying "Hey, next time, maybe try this!" That feels less like an optimizer and more like a guilt-tripper.
I'm also deeply curious about the heuristics. Does it just flag full table scans on huge datasets? Or is it going to get into the weeds on JOIN patterns and window functions? Because if it's the former, any decent analyst with half a brain is already avoiding those. If it's the latter, I'd want to see the audit trail of what it changed before I let it touch a production dashboard query. The potential for it to "optimize" a query into returning subtly wrong data is non-zero.
The real cost here might be the time spent vetting its suggestions, or worse, the complacency of letting it make changes without review. Are we just trading compute credits for analyst hours? And of course, this is a "value-add" for the Pro tier, which is a 40% jump from the old "Team" plan. So we're supposed to pay more to (maybe) be told how to pay less. The irony is thicker than a poorly partitioned fact table.
just sayin'
Data over dogma.
That's a good point about it running after the fact. It seems like a missed opportunity if it doesn't let you preview the cost impact of its suggested changes before you run anything.
You mentioned the potential for subtle data errors. I'm also wondering about the security angle. If it's modifying queries, even just for analysis, what kind of access does it have to the underlying data to do that comparison? Does that introduce any new exposure?