Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
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A developer shares a detailed, honest account of building syntaqlite — a SQLite developer toolset including a parser, formatter, and editor extensions — over three months using AI coding agents (primarily Claude Code). The post covers both where AI genuinely helped (overcoming inertia, accelerating code generation, teaching unfamiliar domains, enabling a more complete feature set) and where it hurt (addictive usage patterns, losing touch with the codebase, deferring design decisions, producing spaghetti code during a 'vibe-coding' phase that required a full rewrite in Rust). The core insight: AI excels at implementation tasks with objectively checkable answers but struggles with architecture, API design, and anything requiring taste, history, or judgment about how humans will actually use software.
Table of contents
Why I wanted itWhat makes it hard and tediousHow it happenedAI is why this project exists, and why it’s as complete as it isWhere AI had its costsRelativityWrap-upSort: