Making SQLite 5% faster would already be powerful.
Here, an AI agent, KISS Sorcar, got 59% improvement in under 8 hours, for less than $150.
GitHub repo below:
SQLite is one of the most battle-tested codebases on earth. Its team has spent nearly 20 years shaving off tiny performance gains.
And it wasn't optimizing some toy benchmark. The gains showed up across transaction-heavy workloads, analytical queries, and blob I/O.
The agent found several places where the default setup was paying unnecessary costs, especially around how transactions hit disk, then changed the code and configuration, benchmarked everything, and attacked its own changes for bugs.
Over 1 million SQLite tests still pass.
This may be one of the more useful demonstrations of where coding agents are heading.
• 2.06x on the official speedtest1 (~30k statements) • 1.90x on TATP (OLTP mix: 400k transactions, 100k subscribers) • 1.30x on the Star Schema Benchmark (13 queries x 2, 1.5M-row lineorder) • 1.25x on kvtest (blob I/O: 40k x 10 KB, seq + random + update)