Lalit Maganti built syntaqlite, a SQLite SQL parser, formatter, validator, and tokenizer written in C and Rust, over three months using AI assistance. Simon Willison compiled it to a WebAssembly wheel to run in Pyodide, then shipped a browser-based playground at tools.simonwillison.net/syntaqlite that requires no installation.
The playground exposes four tabs: Format, Parse, Validate, and Tokenize. The Validate tab is the standout feature. Feed it a query referencing a table called 'usr' against a schema defining 'users', and it returns a structured JSON diagnostic with severity, message, offset fields, and the suggestion 'did you mean users?'. That is schema-aware SQL validation running entirely in the browser.
Maganti's own post, 'Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI', is the real reason to go deeper. It documents what it actually took to ship a non-trivial compiled library as a web tool, and the Hacker News thread is adding context. Note also that syntaqlite ships its own WebAssembly playground at playground.syntaqlite.com, which Willison missed until after publishing.
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