zachmu

You can call it what you want I guess, but "vibe coded" around these parts is a simple pejorative, it means the authors don't know what the code does and the product is poor quality.

Most successful agent-coded projects have a few essential features that it's worth calling out: 1) The human driving it has real domain expertise; 2) There's an oracle for correctness; 3) The agent has a real-world example to copy, adapt, or translate.

This project had all these elements. The human driving the agent understood the technical and product decisions that make a version-controlled database work, because he's been doing that for 8 years. The project uses the existing 5.7M query test suite for SQLite3 as its oracle, as well as adapted versions of Dolt's extensive test suite to verify the version-control features that SQLite has no tests for. And the agent had a human-written implementation of the core product (Dolt) to crib from.

All of this is to say: yes, agents wrote this code, but if you or another randomly chosen software engineer sat down and tried to duplicate this result you wouldn't succeed. You wouldn't know what the agent had gotten wrong at every step of development, or even what questions to ask to find out where the errors might be. Despite the existence of a correctness oracle, the agent on its own cannot iterate to 100% correctness without a domain expert steering it. And that expert also has to have an extensive understanding of the existing code base that's being copied. You can't just say "Claude, implement version control in SQLite3, make no mistakes", it's not going to work.

I remember that engineering decision. You guys were pretty early customers for your throughput and durability requirements (we hadn't even added standby replication yet when you started your integration). We've come a long way in the years since then.

Neon is basically this same idea: postgres on a copy-on-write file system.

These aren't really "branches" though, they're hard forks. You can't merge them back after making changes. Dolt is still the only SQL database with branch and merge.

Figures are per ambulance ride.

What's the incentive for people to contribute to an open source project?

Regardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

It is DOLT, you were right.

lol it's DOLT, not DoIt.

Yegge's Medium uses a serif font so you can tell, but in many faces you can't.

(We still get this comment constantly and it's very unfortunate)