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zainhoda

441 karma · joined October 22, 2014

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zainhoda··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
Working on a web framework that provides some guardrails around what a coding agent can and can’t touch without human approval. Makes it easier to have confidence in 5000 line code changes without having to comb through the code.

https://ont-run.com

zainhoda··on Show HN: Discover apps and websites built by vibe coders worldwide
It would be amazing if the showcase was itself vibe coded. If so, you should showcase it!
zainhoda··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
Mobile app that lets you continue coding while you’re away from your computer.

The goal is to be a full mobile IDE that lets you use Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and other agentic code editors.

Has mobile-native file browsing and git integration.

https://remote-code.com

zainhoda··on Sign in with Apple" broke after update–losing data for a third of users
Oof… coincidentally my task for today is to implement Sign in with Apple.

If you were starting over what would you do differently?

zainhoda··on Elm and the Future of Open Source (With Evan Czaplicki) – Developer Voices [video]
What's The State Of Elm?

I love Elm but I think it's pretty clear that Evan is effectively declaring it as abandonware because he couldn't figure out a business model to sustain him.

What’s Evan Working On?

Sounds like he's talking to a handful of companies that he knows uses Elm and doing some tinkering without any defined objectives.

zainhoda··on Large Enough
I’m waiting for the same signal. There are essentially 2 vastly different states of the world depending on whether GPT-5 is an incremental change vs a step change compared to GPT-4.
zainhoda··on Show HN: We open sourced our entire text-to-SQL product
Would you be interested in merging with Vanna in some way?

You’re ahead of us in terms of interface but we’re ahead of you in terms of adoption (because of specific choices we’ve made and partnerships we’ve done).

zainhoda··on MQL – Client and server to query your db in natural language
Nice job getting something released! How does this compare to the other similar open source solutions like Vanna AI and DataHerald?
zainhoda··on Show HN: Burr – A framework for building and debugging GenAI apps faster
Looks really interesting! I saw something in the code about streaming. Could you explain that a bit more?
zainhoda··on Show HN: LLMdantic: Structured Output Is All You Need
I've been looking for something like this! Does it optimize the prompt template for LangChain only or is there a way I can get it to generate a raw system prompt that I can pass to the OpenAI API directly?
zainhoda··on [dead]
I think of all the options for “carrots” and “sticks” that companies are offering for RTO, I like this one the best.
zainhoda··on Show HN: Natural-SQL-7B, a strong text-to-SQL model
Very cool. Would the license allow for use with Vanna? https://github.com/vanna-ai/vanna
zainhoda··on An open source DuckDB text to SQL LLM
Founder of Vanna AI here -- appreciate the link and I agree, we're solving slightly different problems.
zainhoda··on An open source DuckDB text to SQL LLM
I’m trying to solve for this with my project using RAG and (at least based on what people say in Discord), it’s working really well for them: https://github.com/vanna-ai/vanna
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
That's a fair concern. In actual usage, however, the vast majority of hallucination (>90%) tends to be:

- phantom tables and columns, in which case the query will fail

- incorrect syntax for date functions (i.e. the wrong flavor of SQL)

And we tend to see less of this type of hallucination when there are lots of example SQL queries that have been "trained" into the RAG system.

zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
Author of the package here. Apologies if this wasn't clear in the documentation, but what you're talking about is absolutely possible. Feel free to join our Discord -- we have other users who have this multi-tenant setup.
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
Yes, 100%! Can you turn this comment into a blog post so that I can send it to people who make this claim?
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
One added benefit of RAG is that it's more "pluggable." It's a lot easier to plug into newer LLMs that come out. If and when GPT-5 comes out, it'll be a one character change in your code to start using it and still maintain the same reference corpus.
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
I've noticed this as well. Do you have any theories as to why that is?
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
What would be missing from that is the ability to look up what tables are in the database, how they join together, what terminology the business uses, preferences around whether to exclude nulls from certain columns, etc.

This allows you to ask more of a “business question” like “who are the top 10 customers by sales?” and the LLM will be able to construct a query that joins the customers table to an orders table and get the results that you’re looking for.

With a simple NL to SQL, you’d have to say “join the customer table with the sales table, aggregate on the sales column from the orders table and limit the results to 10 rows” or something along those lines.

zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
That's basically what happens but the power is that in Python, you can do this:

sql = vn.generate_sql(question=...)

Which means that now the SQL can be executed and you can get the table, chart, etc in any interface.

Flask: https://github.com/vanna-ai/vanna-flask

Streamlit: https://github.com/vanna-ai/vanna-streamlit

Chainlit: https://github.com/vanna-ai/vanna-chainlit

Slack: https://github.com/vanna-ai/vanna-slack

zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
Super interesting! Why did you decide to shut down?
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
Author of the package here. Thank you! That's exactly what we've seen. Businesses spent millions of dollars getting all their structured data into a data warehouse and then it just sits there because the people who need the information don't know how to query the database.
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
100% -- in fact originally the package used to parse out SELECT statements and only execute SELECT statements. After some feedback, we decided that the permissions on the user should handle that level of detail.
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
Author of the package here. I think that it probably could handle that but may need more example SQL queries.
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
Author of the package here. Joining 5 tables is not a problem.

The training does not necessarily require you to write the queries by hand. A trick that we've seen people do is to just train with DDL statements and then ask "leading" questions if it can't answer on the first try.

I've been using the package myself for about 6 months and while I haven't forgotten SQL, what I have forgotten are the fully qualified table names and which tables live in which schemas etc since I never have to think about that.

zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
Author of the package here. Yes, this is a very common use case.
zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
This is a good idea. I think what you'd want to do is override the generate_sql function and store the question with the "related" metadata and the generated sql somewhere:

https://github.com/vanna-ai/vanna/blob/main/src/vanna/base/b...

We're going to be adding a generic logging function soon and fairly soon what you're talking about could just be a custom logger.

zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
Author of the package here. It was originally because it's both a name and a finance term because I was originally using this to query a financial database.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/vanna-explanation-of-the-opt...

zainhoda··on Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database
Author of the package here. I would be open to alternative suggestions on terminology! The problem is that our typical user has never encountered RAG before.
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