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.

Architecture on aeshift

Synthesized, Not Engineered