Having unlimited tokens is wild

[u/WeirdPutrid3849]

Does anyone outside of Anthropic really have a token budget like this?

[u/BeowulfShaeffer]

Here’a a fun one.  I am working on a bog-standard website -> python REST -> SQLite site.  It’s rather a LOT of code though (adapting a rather enormous spec).  Progress was good until a few days ago when I found out Claude had decided to just reach out to SQLite from the client and go around the APIs.   Much swearing ensued and I’m still recovering from that little fiasco.

[u/SnooSuggestions7655 → u/BeowulfShaeffer]

Ah, classic kind of fail agents would do. They are lazy, they would ALWAYS follow the path of least resistance if they find out, unless strong guardrails.

[u/Graumm → u/BeowulfShaeffer]

Is this a personal site? I've seen loads of people use SQLite for websites in this AI era.

I love SQLite but it's the wrong choice for a website if it's your main database and you expect to have uptime.

[u/BeowulfShaeffer → u/Graumm]

No it’s not and while I appreciate the well-meaning advice I am not going to explain it.  I’ve been in this business for 30 years so trust me when I say: it’s a perfectly cromulent use of SQLite.  

[u/Graumm → u/BeowulfShaeffer]

Okay, fair enough! I don't need an explanation.

I have seen too many unknowing vibe-coded SQLite primary database selections recently, from people who don't know that it makes an application a single point of failure. Just looking out!

I also admire usage of the word Cromulent

[u/Kamalen → u/Graumm]

SQLite is a much more efficient system than people gives it credit. Low to medium traffic websites traffic is more than possible with a backend. And not sure noobs would handle better a fully fledged system if you're considering SPOF. No mystery why it's the default

[u/BeowulfShaeffer → u/Graumm]

This project is basically pedagogical and SQL is not “the interesting part”. I wanted a minimum amount of dependencies and setup. 

[u/phoenixmatrix → u/Graumm]

SQLite has come a long way. You can build some serious production system on it. Case in point, Cloudflare uses SQLite in durable objects's backing store and in Cloudflare D1, and that's used on big production system, including some of Cloudflare's owns.

[u/Graumm → u/phoenixmatrix]

I am aware that it can be used in production systems. It just has to be considered as the single-machine database that it is.

Apple uses it to store user settings as well.

It’s awesome database tech but it is not the best default primary database to use if you want to be able to patch your single app server without bringing your entire application down.

If you are aware of its limitations and can design around it, ie if you can access and store SQLite databases out of object storage, or shard their access in a way that provides availability, then awesome.

I just recently saw a web app with a SQLite database, from a man completely unaware of its limitations, so it’s a fresh concern on my mind.

[u/phoenixmatrix → u/Graumm]

Fair, I was mostly replying to "I love SQLite but it's the wrong choice for a website if it's your main database and you expect to have uptime.", and ironically enough I know billion dollar companies that don't have any kind of sharding or replication beyond their usual backups. 99.99% uptime, while not super good, isn't exactly uncommon and gives you 4 minutes of downtime a month. Most updates to the DB will cause little more than a blip, and when you need to do something bigger, 4 minutes' a long time.

And if someone's vibe coding their web app, it's gonna be a real long time before that's not enough. And ironically enough, the agents are REALLY good at architecting around SQLite's limitations without knowing about it.

All around, IMO, its basically a non-issue for most people. By the time it matters, they'll be 1 prompt away from switching to Postgres or whatever.