SQL

Evidence (9)

• 5Simon Willison·8/12/2026open_source
  Alchemy Utils 0.1a0 brings SQLite-utils style APIs to multiple databases

  Simon Willison released an alpha of alchemy-utils, a new database-agnostic library and CLI inspired by sqlite-utils. The project uses SQLAlchemy to support multiple engines, including PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DuckDB, while preserving familiar methods such as insert, upsert, create, update, and table introspection.

• 2Simon Willison·7/29/2026research
  Hipp on SQL Simplifying Programmer Work

  D. Richard Hipp is quoted comparing SQL to the earlier era of COBOL programmers who manually generated software for querying large datasets. He argues that SQL reduced the amount of code needed and changed programmers' work rather than eliminating it.

• 9Hacker News·7/22/2026security
  Take-Home Interview Project Hid a Malicious Git Hook

  A developer inspecting a take-home assignment discovered a pre-commit Git hook that would detect the host operating system and fetch a remote script for execution. The payloads were hosted on a raw IP address and appeared designed to run silently when Git operations were performed, indicating a malware delivery attempt disguised as a hiring exercise.

• 4Hacker News·7/22/2026research
  Startup Postgres Survival Guide

  This article is an internal-to-public guide on running Postgres reliably in a startup environment, covering schema design, read and write query patterns, joins, indexes, migrations, connection management, autovacuum, and advanced operations like FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED and partitioning. It emphasizes practical lessons learned from production incidents and tradeoffs that become important as data volume grows.

• 5The New Stack·7/17/2026framework_update
  Why AI agents need auditable evidence packets

  The article argues that AI agents cannot rely on retrieval alone when investigating live system issues such as checkout conversion drops. Instead, they need structured, auditable evidence packets that include query results, data freshness, metric definitions, approximation flags, and counterchecks so conclusions can be verified.

• 3Hacker News·7/16/2026research
  Guide to the Data Tools Landscape for Developers

  This article is a practical overview of the data workflow and the main classes of tools developers encounter in data teams. It explains roles such as analytical and scientific data work, and places tools like notebooks, SQL, spreadsheets, Tableau, Excel, Python, pandas, and scikit-learn in context.

• 4Simon Willison·7/13/2026open_source
  DOOM built on SQLite

  Peter Gostev created DOOMQL, a small Doom-like game where SQLite and SQL handle movement, collision, enemies, combat, progression, and even per-pixel rendering. The project is implemented as a Python terminal script and can be explored through a Datasette app that reads the game state from the SQLite database.

• 4Hacker News·7/3/2026research
  Transcript memory adds little value for coding agents

  A post on Hacker News argues that giving coding agents access to prior session transcripts does not improve SWE task performance when other context sources are available. It says agents do better by relying on artifacts such as docs, commit messages, and pull request history rather than trying to reuse scratch-pad transcript memory.

• 7Cloudflare Blog·5/28/2026product_launch
  Cloudflare builds Town Lake data platform and Skipper AI agent

  Cloudflare describes how it built Town Lake, a unified SQL-based analytics platform that brings together data from many internal systems. On top of it, the company built Skipper, an AI data agent that lets employees query data in plain English while preserving access controls, auditing, and governance.