Ray Tracer in SQL

58 points by kbumsik 52 days ago | 22 comments

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.

tills13 52 days ago | |

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.

malgamves 51 days ago | | |

Do you really think AI can make Doom in TypeScript types?

bigmadshoe 52 days ago | |

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.

sublinear 52 days ago | |

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.

Moosdijk 52 days ago | | |

Who are you replying to?

zX41ZdbW 51 days ago | |

Coding with AI is not much different from coding without AI, just faster and with slightly less typing. But you still have to organize the work and split it into small items. If you ask a model to implement a ray tracer in SQL, it can do something one-shot, but it won't be as satisfactory as with an engineer.

pjmlp 52 days ago | |

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.

laszlokorte 52 days ago |

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/

cma256 52 days ago |

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.

nickpeterson 52 days ago | |

SQL in SQL has never occurred to me.

Jgoauh 52 days ago |

Nice, but why ?

zX41ZdbW 51 days ago | |

It is needed to find bottlenecks in the engine and optimize customer queries. For example, it gives things like: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/108757

You can read more about this approach in my presentation: https://presentations.clickhouse.com/2026-openhouse-sf/great... and video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmS7VopaqNg

jareklupinski 52 days ago | |

sir... this is hacker news

__alexs 52 days ago | |

Good stress test for your SQL parser I guess.

srean 52 days ago | |

To know that it can be done.

jaymee 51 days ago | |

Why not?

mmmlinux 52 days ago |

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

zX41ZdbW 51 days ago | |

It is needed to find bottlenecks in the engine and optimize customer queries. For example, it gives things like: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/108757

You can read more about this approach in my presentation: https://presentations.clickhouse.com/2026-openhouse-sf/great... and video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmS7VopaqNg

JSR_FDED 52 days ago |

How do I join this awesome project?

mghackerlady 52 days ago |

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