Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
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.
