Simon Willison Ships alchemy-utils 0.1a0 — a Cross-Database sqlite-utils — From a Shower Idea in One Morning With Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra

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Released 12 Aug 2026, alchemy-utils reimplements sqlite-utils' core API (insert/upsert/insert_all/upsert_all, create, update, table introspection) on SQLAlchemy so it works against PostgreSQL, SQLite and DuckDB with identical calls. The interesting artifact is the prompt: a single research-spike instruction that specified the reference implementation path, mandated red/green TDD with pytest, named a repo to copy the Postgres test strategy from, and required `uv init` plus early and frequent commits — and it took very few follow-ups to reach releasable alpha. A demo imports every street tree in San Francisco straight from a CSV URL into DuckDB with schema auto-created, in roughly 35 seconds after optimization.