Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
6 days ago
- #AI-assisted development
- #developer experience
- #SQLite tools
- The author spent 250 hours over three months building syntaqlite, a devtool for SQLite, driven by AI coding agents after years of interest.
- AI helped overcome project inertia by generating concrete prototypes and speeding up code writing, especially for repetitive tasks like parser rule generation.
- AI served as a teaching assistant, accelerating learning in unfamiliar areas like Rust and VS Code extensions, and enabled building a more complete project with features like editor extensions and documentation.
- However, AI had costs: it led to addiction-like behavior, caused loss of touch with the codebase, and deferred critical design decisions, resulting in a messy initial codebase that required a full rewrite.
- AI excelled at implementation and refactoring but struggled with architecture and design, lacking historical context and judgment for creating user-friendly APIs.
- The project highlights AI as a force multiplier for coding but warns against relying on it for design, emphasizing the need for human oversight and expertise.