Simon Willison
DOOMQL
agentic
What happened
The post highlights DOOMQL, a Doom-like game engine built entirely in SQLite (using a massive recursive CTE SQL query for ray tracing), generated using GPT-5.6 Sol. Simon Willison demonstrates using Claude Fable 5 to rapidly build a real-time rendering web app inside Datasette to display the game state directly from the database.
Why it matters
It demonstrates that frontier models can now reason through highly complex, non-standard computational logic (like SQL-based ray tracing) and generate working code.
The take
This is a phenomenal showcase of the capabilities of frontier models (GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Fable 5). Writing a recursive CTE ray tracer in SQLite is an incredibly complex, non-standard coding task. The fact that an LLM generated this, and another model instantly built a functional UI to render it, shows how close we are to zero-shot software generation for highly complex, esoteric logic.
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