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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of insane that one of OpenAI's internal test tasks is now "reimplement SQLite from scratch, preserving binary compatibility with existing database files".

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There's nothing insane about writing a de/serializer for an open source format with tests telling you every time you get it wrong to fix in a loop. Insane would be if they were willing to entrust critical production data to their vibecoded replacements (in multiple ways).

Most of the SQLite test suite, TH3, is not open source or available to the public. You need to pay an undisclosed amount of money to access it, which would seem to defeat the already dubious proposition of vibe-coding a SQLite clone.

https://sqlite.org/th3.html

> which would seem to defeat the already dubious proposition of vibe-coding a SQLite clone.

For an individual, but for OpenAI this would be a trivial marketing expense. The purpose is not actually to replace SQLite but to be able to claim your software is capable of it, to perpetuate the ongoing mania.

I would think OpenAI licensed the tests, their availability might have been a reason for picking sqlite for this "benchmark" in the first place

OpenAI paid $15 mil to solve a math problem

If you had told me five years ago that OpenAI was going to be able to do this at all, much less that they were going to do it routinely as a test of new AI models, I would have thought you were being so unrealistically optimistic that I might have suggested that you up your dosage of antipsychotic drugs.

I mean, if you had said they definitely would not be able to do this, I would also have thought you were probably kind of stupid. But we're definitely on the path that looks like AIs keep getting smarter with no limit in sight.

> with no limit in sight

https://xkcd.com/605/

Extrapolating from a one-day change from zero to one: "As you can see, by late next month you'll have over four dozen husbands. Better get a bulk rate on wedding cake."

You cannot seriously think that this is relevant. You're just enacting an unthinking conditioned response of replying with that comic to cases where people can't tell when an increasing quantity is going to stop increasing, even though you can't tell either.

What's wild is that these AI-psychosis people will be running with the "no end in sight" and "exponential improvements" take for years and even decades to come. Even as LLM technology goes through an economic bust and stagnation.

It's like a doomsday cult in reverse.

Have they released this publicly? This seems about on the same order of difficulty to anthropic’s C compiler project, which ultimately failed. I’m surprised if they can do SQLite they wouldn’t show up Anthropic with a real working C compiler.

Maybe C compilers are actually harder?

SQLite at its core is a compiler, and a higher level one than C, so I don’t think that’s likely.

It's compiling a much more tractable language, and most of the complexity in a production C compiler is in the optimizations. C being a lower-level language might make it easier to write a bad compiler for, but it makes it harder to write a good compiler. Take a look at a SQLite query plan sometime and compare it to the assembly output of gcc -O.

They don’t have to produce an optimizing compiler to claim a win though.

gcc -O0 can't compile a bootable Linux kernel, which was their goal

[blatant plug]

I'd point you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151160 for a real C compiler that autovectorises onto the GPU. Or multiple GPUs, or a network of multiple GPUs.

Of course, this wasn't just "hey Claude, write me a compiler, make it rad, yo" - it's been a 6-month long slog, albeit miniscule in comparison to doing it without the LLM.

This is incredibly impressive. Worth mentioning that it's FOSS, under the GPL, since that's a blessing that can't be taken for granted these days.

Hey, thanks :)

It’s nice to get some appreciation for once, rather than an “ai; dr” response :)

And they do it in powershell

Isn’t powershell just a C# (.Net) with an ugly syntax?

Not at all, it has traditional shell abilities, it also integrates with COM and DLLs, and as for the syntax, some of us actually like it instead of cryptic shells.

There is a reason many folks rather use fish shell or Xonsh, instead of classic UNIX shells.

I meant relative to C#, not shell.

Well, you can now write scripts in C#, yet I doubt it got any adoption among DevOps folks.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...

And if you thought that was ridiculous, consider that the "best" implementation is the SQL database it wrote in PHP.

You missed the "solve unsolved math problem, because all other are too easy" tasks

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