Tip: Put Column Names in Schema Context or Your SQL Agent Will Guess and Loop

Simon Willison·medium signal

Using DSPy to tune the Datasette Agent's SQL prompts (Willison, July 2), Fable found that schema listings without column names caused the agent to guess columns and fall into retry loops. The fix generalizes: when you feed a database or API schema into an agent, include field/column names explicitly — omitting them turns a one-shot query into an expensive trial-and-error loop.