Author here. This started because I read Evan Hahn's STRICT tables post [1] last week and got curious how far "just use SQLite" actually holds up under real load, not toy benchmarks.
So I built a small social app (Chirp: 50k users, 1M posts, ~2.5M follows) in one SQLite file, put it behind a plain Node server, and load tested it properly: real HTTP, real JSON serialization, autocannon hammering it over sockets. The worst query in the app (home timeline, which joins follows against posts, counts likes, sorts by time) still did 3,654 req/s on an M1 laptop, which works out to 315M requests/day.
The part I didn't expect going in: WAL vs the old rollback journal isn't a minor tuning knob, it's the whole story. Same query, same data, one pragma changed, and p99 read latency goes from 4.4ms to 133ms once you add a writer. That's the "SQLite locks and blocks everyone" reputation, and it's from a database mode most people don't even use anymore.
I also tried to be honest about where it falls over: reads stop scaling once anything writes (page cache invalidation, not lock contention), there's one write lock for the whole DB, and there's no failover if the box dies. Those are real constraints, not disclaimers.
Also benchmarked Node+better-sqlite3 vs Bun+bun:sqlite since I had the harness built anyway. Bun wins on cheap queries, Node wins on the expensive ones. Wasn't expecting a split.
Happy to answer questions on methodology, the STRICT table stuff, or why we ended up building this the way we did.
Creator could have chosen literally anything else to represent their product but instead went with an animation of boy emojis fighting over a girl emoji.
This is exactly what we built Mira for. It's self-hosted, bring-your-own-model/BYOK, and most importantly, open source.
You point it at your own API keys (e.g. OpenRouter or a local model) so nothing leaves your infra, and it runs as a code reviewer on PRs.
It's also ridiculously quick at reviewing (benchmarks at ~77s) because your PRs aren't sitting in a queue on a cloud somewhere (alternatives are > 5 minutes)
We're working really closely with our users to build the best possible code reviewer. Feedback and contributions are highly encouraged.
A complete desktop app for browsing and editing your Postgres, MySQL, SQLite data, creating beautiful dashboards, and soon designing automated workflows for repeat tasks.
I've kept a devlog of the last 10 months of building DB Pro, which has been the best way to bring users to the product. I'd highly recommend folks starting a devlog if they can.
Finished reading the article, having really enjoyed it (I grew up with Terry's books), came back to the HN comments and the top comment is someone ranting "dIS iS aye-EyE sLoP"
What a terrible, terrible timeline we live in now. Seriously. I genuinely hate it.
We're building a product [1] to compete with DataGrip, a JetBrains product.
Many people told us we were crazy to compete with such a mature product as DataGrip before we got started.
It has been fascinating to speak to people who use database apps and to learn about their experiences.
Now, we have many, many customers telling us that they have cancelled their DataGrip/JetBrains sub and have switched to using our product, mainly due to speed but also cost.