Software-Engineering - Lalit Maganti

Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

2026-04-05T13:00:00+01:00

For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry¹, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a really good developer experience for it².

A couple of weeks ago, after ~250 hours of effort over three months³ on evenings, weekends, and vacation days, I finally released syntaqlite (GitHub), fulfilling this long-held wish. And I believe the main reason this happened was because of AI coding agents⁴.

Of course, there’s no shortage of posts claiming that AI one-shot their project or pushing back and declaring that AI is all slop. I’m going to take a very different approach and, instead, systematically break down my experience building syntaqlite with AI, both where it helped and where it was detrimental.

I’ll do this while contextualizing the project and my background so you can independently assess how generalizable this experience was. And whenever I make a claim, I’ll try to back it up with evidence from my project journal, coding transcripts, or commit history⁵.

Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail

2026-01-13T10:48:00Z

When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s. He would point out a project another team was working on and say, “I don’t believe that project will go anywhere, they’re solving the wrong problem.” I used to wonder, “But you are very senior, why don’t you just go and speak to them about your concerns?” It felt like a waste of his influence to not say anything.

So it’s quite ironic that I found myself last week explaining to a mentee why I thought a sister team’s project would have to pivot because they’d made a poor early design choice. And he rightfully asked me the same question I had years ago: “why don’t you just tell them your opinion?” It’s been on my mind ever since because I realized I’d changed my stance on it a lot over the years.

Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer

2025-12-04T00:15:00Z

Discussed on Hacker News, lobste.rs and r/programming.

Lately I’ve been reading Sean Goedecke’s essays on being a Staff+ engineer. His work (particularly Software engineering under the spotlight and It’s Not Your Codebase) is razor-sharp and feels painfully familiar to anyone in Big Tech.

On paper, I fit the mold he describes: I’m a Senior Staff engineer at Google. Yet, reading his work left me with a lingering sense of unease. At first, I dismissed this as cynicism. After reflecting, however, I realized the problem wasn’t Sean’s writing but my reading.

Sean isn’t being bleak; he is accurately describing how to deal with a world where engineers are fungible assets and priorities shift quarterly. But my job looks nothing like that and I know deep down that if I tried to operate in that environment or in the way he described I’d burn out within months.

Instead I’ve followed an alternate path, one that optimizes for systems over spotlights, and stewardship over fungibility.