Building SQLite with a small swarm

Re:Building SQLite with a small swarm by 9dev on Monday February 16, 2026 @04:39AM (#47032944)

Well--given a full copy of the SQLite test suite, I'm pretty sure it'd get there eventually. I agree that most of these show-off projects are just prop pieces, but that's kind of the point: Demonstrate it's technically possible to do the thing, not actually doing the thing, because that'd have diminishing returns for the demonstration. Still, the idea of setting a swarm of agents to a task, and, given a suitable test suite, have them build a compliant implementation, is sound in itself.

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Re:Building SQLite with a small swarm by layer8 on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:54AM (#47033931)

If you minimax for passing the SQLite test suite, I’m still not sure you’ll have a viable implementation. You can’t prove soundness of code through a test suite alone.

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Re:Building SQLite with a small swarm by groundzeros2015 on Monday February 16, 2026 @09:21AM (#47035303)

> I'm pretty sure it'd get there eventually.

Why? The combinatorics of “just try things until you get it right” makes this impractical.

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Re:Building SQLite with a small swarm by kevinsync on Monday February 16, 2026 @10:59AM (#47036664)

Sure, but that presumes that you have that test suite written without having a single line of application code written (which, to me, is counterintuitive, unrealistic, and completely insane)

SQLite apparently has 2 million tests! If you started only with that and set your agentic swarm against it, and the stars aligned and you ended up with a pristine, clean-room replica that passes everything, other than proof that it could be done, what did you achieve? You stood on the shoulders of giants to build a Bizarro World giant that gets you exactly back to where you began?

I'd be more interested in forking SQLite as-is, setting a swarm of agents against it with the looping task to create novel things on top of what already exists, and see what comes out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLite#Development_and_distrib...

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Re:Building SQLite with a small swarm by mcculley on Monday February 16, 2026 @11:28AM (#47036984)

You think an implementation of SQLite in another language, with more memory safety, has no value?

I agree that this current implementation is not very useful. I would not trust it where I trust SQLite.

Regardless, the potential for having agents build clean room implementations of existing systems from existing tests has value.

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Re:Building SQLite with a small swarm by kyars on Monday February 16, 2026 @04:36PM (#47040658)

agreed!

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