Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI – Lalit Maganti
April 7, 2026
For 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 it2.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 agents4.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.
Stories like this are valuable because particularly for those who aren’t working extensively with AI for software development, it can be hard to even imagine the scale and capability of these systems now.
So, particularly if you’re still a little skeptical, or perhaps you use Copilot, but not an agentic system, I highly recommend you read this article to get the sense of what a capable software engineer with these technologies is now able to do in a matter of weeks although this is a very complex project and in far less time you can certainly build very sophisticated systems.
