Simon Willison

Highlight

Simon’s morning “shower project” sparked the creation of alchemy-utils 0.1a0, a database-agnostic utility backed by SQLAlchemy and co-authored by AI coding agents, representing a major milestone in broadening his popular SQL tool ecosystem.

Posts

alchemy-utils 0.1a0 · Source In a rapid prototyping session triggered by a morning shower idea, Simon experimented with building a database-agnostic sibling to his popular sqlite-utils library. He tasked AI coding agents Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with conducting a research spike to see if they could construct a library featuring the same core API (such as insert, upsert, insert_all, upsert_all, and table introspection) but backed by SQLAlchemy to support multiple database backends. Testing against PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DuckDB using test-driven development (TDD), pytest, and uv, the coding agents produced an alpha-grade codebase with very few follow-up prompts. Simon demonstrated the library’s utility with one-liners using uvx to list rows from a local PostgreSQL database and bulk-insert a CSV of San Francisco tree history into a DuckDB instance. When the initial DuckDB import took almost an hour, he instructed Codex to optimize the code, which successfully reduced the execution time to just 35 seconds.

sqlite-utils 4.2.1 · Source This quick-turnaround patch was released to resolve a crashing bug introduced in the recent sqlite-utils 4.2 release. The crash occurred because the typing-extensions package had not been formally declared as a project dependency; it had gone unnoticed during local development because other dev dependencies transitively pulled it in. However, when running the CLI tool cleanly in isolation via uvx, the missing dependency resulted in immediate failure. To prevent similar packaging regressions, Simon established a robust smoke testing methodology using the command uv run --no-default-groups --isolated, which forces uv to ignore default development dependency groups and isolate the run from any local virtual environments to ensure perfect execution from clean installs.

alchemy-utils 0.1a1 · Source Following up immediately on the heels of the first alpha, Simon released alchemy-utils 0.1a1. This release specifically packages and delivers a performance boost for DuckDB exports and CSV imports. This optimization represents the immediate incorporation of the performance enhancements developed alongside Codex during the initial 0.1a0 prototype spike.

Project Pulse

Today’s blog activity highlights a heavy focus on database interoperability and robust packaging tooling. Simon is actively leveraging state-of-the-art coding agents to bootstrap database-agnostic utilities while polishing Python deployment hygiene using uv and automated CLI smoke tests.

🛠️ I can generate a clean template script in your workspace demonstrating how to run isolated Python CLI smoke tests using Simon’s exact uv command configuration.