Ray Tracer in SQL

7/1/2026 at 4:48:42 PM

In the Age of AI coding, this lovely cool demos are no longer interesting anymore. I use to appreciate them by the craftsmanship and hacking aptitude they required, but now AI took away that joy of watch this for me.

by agustechbro

7/1/2026 at 5:19:29 PM

Yeah. Remember when that guy made Doom in TypeScript types? That was incredible. This feels shallow and dull. Interesting idea and cool that ClickHouse -- a primarily human made piece of software -- can even do this but I agree it no longer does it for me.

by tills13

7/2/2026 at 11:06:05 AM

Indeed, I am just waiting for the last drop, when AI tooling becomes good enough for handling machine code directly.

Note that a lot of programming can already be done via orchestration flows calling into mcp tools (replacing classical microservices).

All the no code/low code tools have migrated into it as their evolution.

by pjmlp

7/1/2026 at 7:17:37 PM

Absolutely. These things are inherently pointless - what makes them cool is the human ingenuity required to achieve them. Remove that and it’s totally uninteresting.

by bigmadshoe

7/1/2026 at 5:44:55 PM

That feeling has nothing to do with AI. That's how art has always been. Most of these were bad at being art even before AI.

A good reference for exactly what I mean would be the demoscene (both back then and now). You can watch a thousand of those and be totally underwhelmed, but every now and then you get one that totally blows your mind.

There's nothing wrong with seeking novelty, but there is something wrong being jaded about it.

by sublinear

7/1/2026 at 6:52:43 PM

Who are you replying to?

by Moosdijk

7/1/2026 at 4:40:11 PM

Very cool! I did a similar (but much simpler!) experiment by implementing perspective projection via SQL, storing meshes (vertices, edges, faces), the camera position and the screen size in tables and building a single query that generates the SVG paths (including backface culling). Running via WASM SQlite inside the web browser. [1]

  SELECT project(...) as x, project(...) as y 
  FROM model, vertex, camera, transform 
  WHERE clockwise AND clipped IN BETWEEN -1 AND 1

[1]: https://static.laszlokorte.de/sql3d/

by laszlokorte

7/1/2026 at 3:59:09 PM

Very cool project. Next they should create a database with SQL. Querying my database's database with my database's SQL's SQL would be trippy.

by cma256

7/1/2026 at 9:26:32 PM

SQL in SQL has never occurred to me.

by nickpeterson

7/1/2026 at 8:10:45 PM

I love all the "But Why?!?" and "It's LLM so it doesn't count" comments.

by mmmlinux

7/1/2026 at 4:03:11 PM

Nice, but why ?

by Jgoauh

7/1/2026 at 4:42:57 PM

sir... this is hacker news

by jareklupinski

7/1/2026 at 4:56:21 PM

Good stress test for your SQL parser I guess.

by __alexs

7/1/2026 at 8:07:08 PM

To know that it can be done.

by srean

7/1/2026 at 7:23:17 PM

How do I join this awesome project?

by JSR_FDED

7/1/2026 at 6:54:11 PM

Look, I love a good hack, but just. No. Why would you ever want to do this. The intersection of skill and masochism needed for this shouldn't exist and yet it does

by mghackerlady

7/1/2026 at 6:51:21 PM

[dead]

by dileeppandiya