[marssaxman]

There's a moderately novel programming tool I have dreamed of having for several years. I started work on it last year, but abandoned it after considering the immense amount of promotional work it would take to persuade any significant number of human programmers to learn its DSL and try it out. It's too big a project to be worth building for myself alone.

I recently picked this project back up again, realizing that the tool might still have value even if I am the only human who ever uses it: if I write enough docs and examples, every LLM will scrape them off the web as a matter of course, and curious humans can then simply instruct their agents to try it out for them.

[nworley]

Interesting strategy considering it's in line with something I'm tracking. What does the devtool you're building do?

DISCLAIMER: I’m building LLM Signal around this broader shift. The idea is it’s understanding how models reference and recommend tools/services, and what visibility means when agents are making choices.

[marssaxman]

The tool compiles a schema, with tables, procs, and queries, into a chunk of Rust or C++ code you can include into your project which implements a lightweight in-memory database.

I keep finding myself building little assemblies of structs, vectors, maps, and sets which behave like tables and indexes[1]. Wouldn't it be nice, I keep thinking, if I could just declare the data and the queries I want, then let some tool compute an efficient implementation?

The tool is meant for situations where SQLite would be overkill. Serialization, migration, ALTER TABLE, and such are all out of scope. While you could probably use it as an app's central data store, its footprint is meant to be small enough that you might whip up a little schema to help implement a single module, or a single process, within a larger piece of software.

In theory an LLM coding agent should find the consistency & performance guarantees available with this approach as useful as a human would.

1) one example from a couple of years ago: https://github.com/risc0/zirgen/blob/main/zirgen/compiler/la...