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minimaltomyesterday at 9:03 PM3 repliesview on HN

I went clicking through to see if I could find the prompt they fed the AI to locate the issue / write the test suite.

I couldn't find it, so its unclear if the prompt was completely "make a test suite" or was lead towards finding it in the first place, which wouldn't be a fair test.

The closest I mention of the prompt I could find was:

> Then I asked it to write a simple workload which exercised the WAL insert and checkpoint code. Notably, this is a completely generic workload.

With a skeptical lens, unclear.


Replies

carlsverreyesterday at 9:13 PM

Hey, author here! Good question. The prompt was to use the Antithesis skills[1] to write a workload that exercises SQLite's insertion and checkpoint machinery across multiple processes using a specific version of SQLite (3.51.2). The agent who did the work was aware of the bug and knew I wanted to see if Antithesis could reproduce it. However, I specifically designed the workload the same way we approach testing other WAL checkpoint-style systems: by putting them under stress. The workload itself does not know about the bug.

My goal, which I believe I accomplished, was to determine if Antithesis would have found this bug if we had put the SQLite WAL under test.

[1]: https://github.com/antithesishq/antithesis-skills

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gamegoblinyesterday at 9:10 PM

Their founder guy says[1] they found some other bugs while doing this that they will report soon, so if that is true, seems more plausibly like a pretty generic thing.

Looking forward to seeing the other bugs they found.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278351

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