Synthesized, Not Engineered

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a paper out of Cornell this week that should make you uncomfortable if you build general-purpose software systems for a living.

GenDB takes a simple, almost reckless-sounding premise: what if you replaced your database’s query execution engine with an agentic system that writes fresh, custom C++ code for every single query? No fixed operator set. No general-purpose execution model. Just an LLM that looks at your query, your data, and your hardware, then synthesizes exactly the program needed to answer it.

A TeX Chess Engine Isn't a Trick; It's What Agents Do Under Constraint

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You shouldn’t read the “chess engine in pure TeX” stunt as a party trick. You should read it as a warning shot. Coding agents are now good enough at systems thinking under hostile constraints that your bottleneck is shifting from “can the agent write code” to “can you give it guardrails, tests, and observability before it invents a tiny virtual machine inside your build.”

Mathieu Acher’s write-up tells the whole story.

Agentic-Engineering on aeshift

Synthesized, Not Engineered

A TeX Chess Engine Isn't a Trick; It's What Agents Do Under Constraint