Comment by conception
7 days ago
This is a hilarious article.
“It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It's a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless.”
“This magic that literally didn’t exist two years ago in more than a toy state is moving at such a rapid rate that it couldn’t even reproduce sqlite three months ago and only got better enough in those weeks to produce a bad version of sqlite! Clearly useless! It has no value, no one is using it to do any work and won’t get better over the next three months or three years!”
An amazing take.
You’re shifting the goalposts. The initial point was that the Rust regeneration of SQLite was wasted money, because it’s unviable due to its slow speed. You’re trying to shift it to be about how it may get better over time. Do you have something that is more specifically refuting the initial quote that doesn’t involve anything about potential improvement?
The point wasn’t to make better SQLite, it was to make a functioning rust SQLite. Which it did. Badly but you don’t start at race cars. No one was assuming production SQLite.
Well... the actual problem is, imho, that it looks like the LLMs seem to have reached (or are close to reaching) a plateau. You might be right about the "three months ago it could not produce a working implementation of a DBMS... but what if in 3 months (or 3 years) it stays stuck at the 20K slower threshold?
People have been saying, without any evidence at all, it's reached or about to reach a plateau for years now. We are clearly still seeing significant forward progress. While it's reasonable to think it will hit some plateau eventually, there's no reason to think that right now just happens to be as good as it's ever going to get.
Context is the plateau. It's why RAM prices are spiking. We're essentially throwing heap at the problem hoping it will improve. That's not engineering. It's not improving on a fundamental, technical level.
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Opus 4.5/4.6 are definitely not plateaus. Definitely a threshold of quality improvement.
20Kx slower is still faster than my manager could write it.
Where are my flying cars?
Flying cars exist? You can get one.
Why do I want to reproduce sqlite? It’s a library. The point of it is to be already written.
Maybe a native rust version of it has value for some people? :)