Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
Highlights
- ▸Every working developer has an eight-years-of-wanting backlog — projects they'd build if they had more time, that AI-assisted workflows now make three-month achievable
- ▸Time compression ratio ~8:3 (years-wanted : months-built) is consistent across multiple Simon projects — it's a pattern, not a one-off
- ▸'What's in your eight-year backlog' is the better question than 'will AI replace engineers' — backlog clearance is the biggest near-term unlock, not job displacement
Original excerpt
Sponsored by: Honeycomb — AI agents behave unpredictably. Get the context you need to debug what actually happened. Read the blog
Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI (via) Lalit Maganti provides one of my favorite pieces of long-form writing on agentic engineering I've seen in ages.
They spent eight years thinking about and then three months building syntaqlite, which they describe as "high-fidelity devtools that SQLite deserves".
The goal was to provide fast, robust and comprehensive linting and verifying tools for SQLite, suitable for use in language servers and other development tools - a parser, formatter, and verifier for SQLite queries. I've found myself wanting this…
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