GoKawiilFor eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a really good developer experience for it .
A couple of weeks ago, after ~250 hours of effort over three months3 on evenings, weekends, and vacation days, I finally released syntaqlite (GitHub), fulfilling this long-held wish. And I believe the main reason this happened was because of AI coding agents .
Of course, there’s no shortage of posts claiming that AI one-shot their project or pushing back and declaring that AI is all slop. I’m going to take a very different approach and, instead, systematically break down my experience building syntaqlite with AI, both where it helped and where it was detrimental.
I’ll do this while contextualizing the project and my background so you can independently assess how generalizable this experience was. And whenever I make a claim, I’ll try to back it up with evidence from my project journal, coding transcripts, or commit history5.
Why I wanted it
In my work on Perfetto, I maintain a SQLite-based language for querying performance traces called PerfettoSQL. It’s basically the same as SQLite but with a few extensions to make the trace querying experience better. There are ~100K lines of PerfettoSQL internally in Google and it’s used by a wide range of teams.
Having a language which gets traction means your users also start expecting things like formatters, linters, and editor extensions. I’d hoped that we could adapt some SQLite tools from open source but the more I looked into it, the more disappointed I was. What I found either wasn’t reliable enough, fast enough6, or flexible enough to adapt to PerfettoSQL. There was clearly an opportunity to build something from scratch, but it was never the “most important thing we could work on”. We’ve been reluctantly making do with the tools out there but always wishing for better.
On the other hand, there was the option to do something in my spare time. I had built lots of open source projects in my teens7 but this had faded away during university when I felt that I just didn’t have the motivation anymore. Being a maintainer is much more than just “throwing the code out there” and seeing what happens. It’s triaging bugs, investigating crashes, writing documentation, building a community, and, most importantly, having a direction for the project.
But the itch of open source (specifically freedom to work on what I wanted while helping others) had never gone away. The SQLite devtools project was eternally in my mind as “something I’d like to work on”. But there was another reason why I kept putting it off: it sits at the intersection of being both hard and tedious.
What makes it hard and tedious
... continue reading