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Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

(github.com)
103 points nicktikhonov | 1 comments | 20 Jun 25 11:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source

SnapQL is an open-source desktop app (built with Electron) that lets you query your Postgres database using natural language. It’s schema-aware, so you don’t need to copy-paste your schema or write complex SQL by hand.

Everything runs locally — your OpenAI API key, your data, and your queries — so it's secure and private. Just connect your DB, describe what you want, and SnapQL writes and runs the SQL for you.

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sgarland ◴[20 Jun 25 23:36 UTC] No.44333123[source]▶
Genuinely do not understand the point of these tools. There is already a practically natural language to query RDBMS; it’s called SQL. I guarantee you, anyone who knows any other language could learn enough SQL to do 99% of what they wanted in a couple of hours. Give it a day of intensive study, and you’d know the rest. It’s just not that complicated.
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nicktikhonov ◴[20 Jun 25 23:45 UTC] No.44333181[source]▶
and yet this was on the front page of hacker news for an entire day :D

it's all about friction. why spend minutes writing a query when you can spend 5 seconds speaking the result you want and get 90-100% of the way there.

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sgarland ◴[20 Jun 25 23:49 UTC] No.44333201[source]▶
Mostly because you don’t know if it’s correct unless you know SQL. It’s entirely too easy to get results that look correct but aren’t, especially when using windowing functions and the like.

But honestly, most queries I’ve ever seen are just simple joins, which shouldn’t take you 5 minutes to write.

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AdieuToLogic ◴[21 Jun 25 01:01 UTC] No.44333601[source]▶
> Mostly because you don’t know if it’s correct unless you know SQL. It’s entirely too easy to get results that look correct but aren’t ...

This is the fundamental problem when attempting to use "GenAI" to make program code, SQL or otherwise. All one would have to do is substitute SQL with language/library of choice above and it would be just as applicable.

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1. sgarland ◴[21 Jun 25 02:17 UTC] No.44333943[source]▶
Fully agree, I just harp on SQL because a. It’s my niche b. It always seems to be a “you can know this, but it doesn’t really matter” thing even for people who regularly interact with RDBMS, and it drives me bonkers.