16 comments

  • malisper 2 hours ago
    Hi! I'm the creator of pgrust. Let me explain what happened.

    For the most part, the actual accusations are false. This submission was an earlier version of pgrust 0.4 called pgrust 0.4-preview. We just open-sourced a newer version called pgrust 0.4-beta yesterday, and you can fully audit it here[0]. Rather than contest the accusations on GitHub, we figured it would be easier to complete pgrust 0.4 and open-source it to show that we're being honest. You can also verify what I'm saying yourself against the 0.4-preview binary we submitted to ClickBench here[1]. I don't have a way to prove this is the exact binary submitted, but if ClickHouse provided the SHA of the binary they tested against, it would match.

    The three main accusations boil down to: 1) We used handwritten code optimized against each query in the benchmark, 2) We cached the results between query runs, and 3) We didn't support queries outside of the 43 ClickBench queries.

    First, we did not use handwritten queries. The code Alexey pointed out does not run during the benchmark. The design of 0.4 relies on a JIT compiler that compiles your SQL to a Lisp-based intermediate representation that we call Gravity IR that we then convert to x86 and ARM assembly. While developing 0.4, I wrote handwritten code against the IR for benchmarking purposes. The idea was that if queries written in our IR are fast, and we can compile good enough IR fast, then our new query engine will be fast. This is also the reason the directory those "kernels" are in is called "irprobe" - it was a probe of our IR to make sure it was fast. Our 0.4-preview submission went through the pipeline: SQL query -> Gravity IR -> assembly.

    Second, the "result-cache" Alexey observed is the result of a cache we use to cache which predicates match which strings in our dictionaries we use for dictionary compression. Alexey wasn't aware of this cache and assumed we were just caching the query results. On ClickBench you are allowed to use caches like this that hold intermediate data[2]. ClickHouse has its own cache similar to this called the Condition Cache[3]. In our newest submission, we were upfront about all the caching we do and how to disable each cache[4].

    The third claim that we didn't support other queries outside of the 43 ClickBench queries is partially false, but does have some ground to it. As I said before, pgrust 0.4-preview was an early version of pgrust 0.4. Once our new JIT compiler supported enough SQL to handle the ClickBench queries, we decided to submit it to ClickBench. AFAIK, ClickBench has no rules about how much SQL you need to support. On top of that, we did ship that we did ship 0.4-preview with our old query engine. It would have been a two-line change to fall back to it and support a much broader set of queries outside what our new engine could support. Those queries would still be fast, but not quite as fast as our new engine was. Our new 0.4-beta release does now support all Postgres SQL (minus some bugs around CTEs and MERGE)

    To sum up, pgrust 0.4-preview was an early build of pgrust 0.4 while it was in development. It was a real query engine and actually executed queries. I acknowledge that we submitted it prematurely, when it supported a narrow set of SQL, and we should have ensured broader SQL coverage before submitting it. With our new submission that solves these problems, and we're hoping for pgrust to be reinstated. If there's anything off about the submission, please point it out and we're happy to fix it.

    [0] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/releases/tag/v0.4-beta

    [1] https://pgrust.com/downloads/archive/2026-09-clickbench-snap...

    [2] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/blob/main/README.md

    [3] https://clickhouse.com/docs/concepts/features/performance/ca...

    [4] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/2751

    • lambda 1 hour ago
      Even with your explanation, this whole thing seems weird and scammy. What's the point of submitting something that is so incomplete and heavily tailored to this one benchmark outside of self promotion?

      Benchmarks should be used for measuring general purpose query engines, not be an end in themselves.

      This seems like a prime example of Goodhart's law. This benchmark is now just being used as a target for self promotion.

    • mort96 48 minutes ago
      What's the explanation for paths to q00.rs-q36.rs being in the binary?
    • remywang 1 hour ago
      Thanks for the explanation, can you release the source of 0.4-preview so that people can understand what was going on?
    • spongebobstoes 48 minutes ago
      thanks for your explanation. I'd love to see a concise explanation of the difference in benchmark performance between -preview and -beta

      that would help clear the air, if the full-sql version has similar performance to the partial-sql version

    • jimmydoe 1 hour ago
      thanks for the explanation, let's first see if the binary matches.
    • tpetry 1 hour ago
      Honestly, if the database is not able to be run with a variety of queries other than the one used by ClickBench then don't submit it to the benchmark. Every other database in their list can run anything you throw at it. Hiding behind messaging that it was an early 0.4 build that can't do everything is ... weird! Just don't submit it to ClickBench if it is not usable by the world yet.

      I hope they don't allow pgrust in again until the project matured. Otherwise the benchmark will be useless as it gets flooded by many projects that can run ClickBench fast but have questionable support for everything else.

    • anonymous908213 54 minutes ago
      > For the most part, the actual accusations are false. This submission was an earlier version of pgrust 0.4 called pgrust 0.4-preview.

      This is a non-sequitur. It doesn't matter what the earlier version is called. It is what you submitted, and it is what the accusations are against. You don't get to create a new submission that (allegedly) fixes all of the issues and then say that the previous accusations are "false". Downplaying the issues by calling it a 'preview' when you submitted it yourself is also a bit of having your cake and eating it too, don't you think?

      > ClickBench has no rules about how much SQL you need to support.

      It is because of people like you that we have warnings not to eat tide pods, Jesus Christ.

    • philipwhiuk 1 hour ago
      Can you explain "PGRUST_GRAVITY_Q20_VARIANT"?
      • malisper 1 hour ago
        It's a feature flag we used for our own internal benchmarking. It doesn't get hit when you run SQL.
        • philipwhiuk 1 hour ago
          But it's not in the code you open sourced?
          • malisper 1 hour ago
            0.4-preview was an early version of 0.4 that still had some cruft like the feature flag you pointed out. We removed the cruft for the release of 0.4-beta
    • infamouscow 35 minutes ago
      [flagged]
      • minimaxir 24 minutes ago
        You are being downvoted because you are disproportionately aggro which undermines your point.
  • drchaim 4 hours ago
    • ActionHank 3 hours ago
      Should be outright banned as a precaution.

      Two possible paths lead to their cheating code getting into a release. Either it was added by coding agent and no one looked at it, bad, but worse would be that a person was aware of it and approved - that's malicious.

      Either way you don't want to be platforming the product because neither shows any degree of responsibility.

      • malisper 1 hour ago
        Or the third explanation is we didn't cheat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50209450
        • fatty_patty89 11 minutes ago
          where's the sourcecode for 0.4-preview?
        • LtWorf 59 minutes ago
          • throwaway894345 30 minutes ago
            That comment doesn't evidence cheating, it reiterates that they submitted the result prematurely which was already admitted in the comment that your link was responding to. Unfortunately I guess people don't read the comments they reply to (or link to, in this case).
            • shawabawa3 11 minutes ago
              So, the charge was that they submitted a build specifically tuned for clickbench

              The defense was that it wasn't specifically tuned for clickbench, it was just an early incomplete build that happened to only support exactly and clickbench queries and nothing else...

              Doesn't feel like much of a defense to me. At best it's benchmaxxing if not clear outright cheating

              • throwaway894345 5 minutes ago
                > The defense was that it wasn't specifically tuned for clickbench, it was just an early incomplete build that happened to only support exactly and clickbench queries and nothing else...

                According to both the ClickHouse founder who was levying the accusations and the pgrust creator, the submission worked for many other queries it just didn’t have full SQL support.

            • LtWorf 15 minutes ago
              Insinuating that I didn't read is against this website's rules.

              Using a throwaway account to reply is suspicious to say the least.

              • throwaway894345 1 minute ago
                > Insinuating that I didn't read is against this website's rules.

                Fair enough.

                > Using a throwaway account to reply is suspicious to say the least.

                My account is older than yours and has ~7x the activity. Maybe you mean “using an anonymous account is suspicious”?

    • sondr3 4 hours ago
      Hope the ClickHouse maintainers stand their ground and do not let pgrust back in until it and the maintainer has matured more.
    • Cyph0n 2 hours ago
      Love the confidence and complete lack of acknowledgement of the initial fuck up.
    • Zookaz 3 hours ago
      Maintainer of pgrust trying to get it merged in is insane
    • dorianmariecom 2 hours ago
      written with claude lol
      • ncruces 2 hours ago
        Did they ask Claude "don't cheat" this time round?
        • ModernMech 17 minutes ago
          You joke but when benchmarking with ai this is important. When you tell it optimize X, it will do so at any cost, including cheezing benchmarks. So you have to make sure you tell it what it can’t optimize along with what it can.
  • torben-friis 4 hours ago
    This idea of "here's the beta, I'll release the code in a few weeks" sounds counter intuitive to me. is it normal in open source? Any reason for it?
    • malisper 1 hour ago
      In the past, we've done that because we've tended to do large refactors, many of which we've backed out of. For that reason, we've kept our own internal development version, which is ahead of the public version. Then when whatever we're developing is ready for public use, then we open source it
      • torben-friis 4 minutes ago
        I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here, sorry.

        Why not keep that internal version as a dev branch separate from main? I can see the appeal of keeping things out of master/main for a while, but not why you would keep that part of development hidden.

        But most importantly, why let out the binary and not the source? presumably if something is not ready for public use, the artifact being out is worst of both worlds - unready code is out and the public can't check what it does.

        Not trying to argue mind you, but if this was not a deliberate attempt to hide the binary's behavior I think I'm missing the alternative upsides that justify that flow.

    • pdpi 27 minutes ago
      That model of development is what led to Eric Raymond’s seminal The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay.

      “Cathedral” refers to development behind closed doors, where you just get a release and a source dump to go with it.

      “Bazaar” refers to development done in the open, where you have constant access to the bleeding edge.

      At the time of the essay, GCC and Emacs were ESR’s examples of Cathedral-style development, and Linux was the premiere example of the Bazaar style.

      The Cathedral style has become a lot less common over the years, but it’s still how e.g. SQLite operates, I think? E.g. Google definitely operates like that with AOSP, but that's arguably more a fruit of them being maliciously compliant with their Open Source promises.

    • verdverm 4 hours ago
      Not normal. This a new trend of people who use too much Ai, or maybe more specifically the Claw/Ralph loops where you end up with a few commits touching 1000s of files. For about the last year, many Show HN to github projects are often just a single commit

      We need to think more about what we are doing as an industry, instead of letting the machines think for us (imo)

      • jerf 3 hours ago
        Let any who read this be aware: You should be immediately suspicious of AI code that is much much faster than established code bases. AIs are even better at benchmarkmaxxing than humans are, and humans were already pretty good.

        It is by no means impossible for an AI-written code base to be faster than a conventionally-written one, of course. It's just a time to be suspicious. Especially if there's little to no evidence that the human has subjected the code base to any further testing of their own. AIs seen to be able to benchmarkmax even in the presence of a lot of unit tests that would generally speaking have prevented a human from going too far down that road.

      • NewLogic 3 hours ago
        I am getting increasing disillusioned by the number of peers I am seeing completely hand over their thinking to a tool. Agents are great, but if you can't explain to me how your PR changes a system and why design choices were made you are no longer an engineer.
        • embedding-shape 3 hours ago
          Agreed. Used to be prevalent in the frontend world (now I think it's the only thing that exists seemingly), where programmers would copy-paste stuff from Stack Overflow until things worked, and when you asked "So why did this actually fix the issue?" they usually said "I'm not sure, but it works now, that's what matters". This seems to be standard practice across the entire stack now.

          I've even wasted my time jumping on calls (requested by the other party) where after 5 minutes of conversation, it's extremely clear this "technical founder" doesn't even understand the basics of their own design and architecture of the product itself, even less the technical parts.

          • verdverm 3 hours ago
            This seems more a product of the incentives we have in society, namely seeing the rich and wealthy on social media and then wanting that quick and easy. So many of those cases are not people with passion for the problem.

            Good things take real effort, bring back the TLC!

            • mschuster91 3 hours ago
              > Good things take real effort, bring back the TLC!

              Ain't no one willing to reward the real effort any more. I take pride in not using LLMs beyond the capability of IntelliJ's advanced autocomplete, but then again, I only code for fun these days given I fled IT for electrical engineering.

              • verdverm 3 hours ago
                > Ain't no one willing to reward the real effort any more.

                A product of the times we currently live in, but which can also be changed.

                This is a recent Michael Sandel talk I watch that has my brain gears turning on this subject

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo

        • verdverm 3 hours ago
          What we don't want to do is mirror the partisan political environment in the Ai yay, nay, or how. We need to be able to talk to each other in understanding and a shared reality of facts. Too much hyperbole right now, starting from the top of the big US labs. They need to step down a few ego and sycophancy pegs
  • stemchar 3 hours ago
    Oh lord. I thought pgrust was a serious project.
    • ActionHank 3 hours ago
      You thought the vibe coded postgres port was a serious project?
      • sgarland 3 hours ago
        Tbf, the author (prompter?) went on Postgres.fm [0] recently to discuss it, and while it didn’t make me entirely confident in it, it did at least seem like it was several steps above the average vibe project.

        0: https://postgres.fm/episodes/pgrust

        • verdverm 3 hours ago
          A lot of podcasters don't have the expertise to evaluate Ai generated/assisted output. I see this much more outside of the development community. Algorithms have warped the incentives and people have stopped doing basic due diligence.

          To be fair to the postgres.fm guys (who I do like and appreciate), the pgrust code was not available a the time of recording.

      • stemchar 3 hours ago
        The way it has been defended and talked about here, yeah, I did. It wasn't just a "here's this vibe slop, do what you wish" dump.
    • xdavidliu 1 hour ago
      first time I found out about it was on reddit

      https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/QJ5uNP5XMT

  • bmacho 2 hours ago
    ai;dr: a bench result is not randomized, and it returns cached result somewhere.

    My opinion: (some) bench results should run on randomized data.

  • frevib 3 hours ago
    These massive PR summaries. Is anyone really reading them?
    • tempest_ 1 hour ago
      The LLMs are, they wrote them after all.
    • eviks 3 hours ago
      they are "For the record"
  • HackerThemAll 1 hour ago
    I’ll sit out this drama until pgrust 0.5.
    • nvme0n1p1 52 minutes ago
      Good choice. I'm sure version 0.5 will be the version where this vibe coded rust rewrite will finally be free of drama once and for all.
  • teiferer 3 hours ago
    For anybody not familiar with pgrust or ClickBench:

    Pgrust is a re-implememtation of postgresql in rust.

    ClickBench is a benchmark suite for databases.

    The link goes to a removal request of pgrust fromthat benchmark because of its alleged cheating.

    • anonymous908213 19 minutes ago
      > The link goes to a removal request

      Incorrect, the link is to a PR from the creator of Clickbench and already merged. It is not a "request".

    • verdverm 3 hours ago
      > alleged cheating

      It was more discovered than alleged, but perhaps "cheating" is an inaccurate word as well, this is just Ai being Ai and a human obviously doing eyes free coding.

    • Vaushite 1 hour ago
      confirmed cheating, not alleged
  • dheatov 3 hours ago
    That's one high profile instance of human vs robot. Surreal.
  • verdverm 5 hours ago
    Sounds kind of like Claude was "cheating" and the humans are engaged in eyes-free coding. Diff so big github refuses to render. I suspect they are reaching the limits of what this new vibe "paradigm" of programming can do. If you haven't pushed a vibe project far, eventually progress becomes near impossible because the slop has grown and the conditions are overly complex, locally focused. Ai is not good at writing reusable software (on their own).

    stay in the loop friends

    • parasti 3 hours ago
      To be fair Github refuses to render diffs after a couple of hundred lines.
      • verdverm 3 hours ago
        The prior (2nd) commit with ~1700 files at least shows the file tree and such a warning, the latest (3rd) commit is something so big, GitHub will not even do that.
    • thatsabadlook 5 hours ago
      Yup. These are people who have gone full Claude. The dopamine seeking is at previously unseen levels. they think this pr is some factual item that means something so they post it on HN as click bait. But no it only means something to a fulltime ai slopper
      • ModernMech 5 minutes ago
        These invectives are verging on slurs at this point. You don’t know anything about the chemical seeking disposition of the author who is actually here in the comments, so why don’t we just stick to facts instead of loading posts with hyperbole and name calling? All it’s does is invite name calling and hyperbole back. You can express your frustration in ways more conducive to productive discourse.
      • verdverm 4 hours ago
        If the Ai came back to me with a 1600x improvement (still in pgrust readme), I would be highly suspicious of the Ai and the code it wrote

        The hype factory must grow, I suppose, though I would prefer if the model makers would stop with this "complete the task by any and every means possible" and replace it with "I don't know, I should ask or do more learning"

        At least they have added a test which looks to make sure the Ai doesn't do it again... if you need this kind of test, something is wrong

        https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/38634b408dea373f3944...

        • shawabawa3 4 hours ago
          I've noticed it with a lot of random stuff i've been trying

          I'll tell claude, "write an implementation of an AAC decoder that is 50% faster than ffmpeg"

          and it will do it! Amazing!

          Then i tell it "hmm ffmpeg has been really well optimised, are you sure?" and it says "oh, i was running our code directly but running ffmpeg executables with loads of overhead, ffmpeg is actually 50% faster"

          • ddorian43 2 hours ago
            You can't compare optimizations done on audio encoding/decoding (often hand written assembly) to something like PostgreSQL which has many moving/inefficient parts.

            The optimizations on PostgreSQL are real if done correctly, it's just a very big project.

            • shawabawa3 6 minutes ago
              My point was that while Claude _is_ legitimately very good at optimising. It will also write its own benchmarks to test its optimisations which are frequently stacked in its favour. You have to be very careful that reported speedups are actually real
          • verdverm 3 hours ago
            Transformers will def get us to AGI /s

            My new definition for The Singularity is not about Ai intelligence, it is about humans handing over critical thinking regardless of Ai capabilities

            Ai companions are where I put the highest p(doom)

        • thatsabadlook 4 hours ago
          If I saw that test in a PR I would not only reject the PR and ask a lot of questions but someone would likely take a forced vacation to deslop their brain.
    • chuckadams 3 hours ago
      It was certainly assisted by AI, but there isn't an agent out there that does that kind of cheating without deliberate prompting by the operator.

      I've taken a vibe-coded project pretty far, with even better testing than most other things: the main factor is that it's big on falsifiability, i.e. it has to see a test for a new feature actually fail before it considers the test any good. Not just the red/green from being originally unimplemented, it does a mutation test to ensure it flips back to red. But wow did it ever make that test framework complicated, byzantine, and ultimately brittle until I stepped in and forced a consolidation and simplification pass (twice now). Part of the complexity came from it being a polyglot monorepo, but I've found even in other places, you have to follow an expand-contract cycle of development when vibe-coding. Not all that different from any other system you've built up organically, just on a much faster cycle.

      But back to my original point, none of this really applies to the pgrust benchmark, which was obvious and blatant cheating on the human's part.

      • Bootvis 3 hours ago
        Anecdote: I have seen it cheat / bend the rules with my own eyes.

        In hindsight, this shouldn’t be surprising. The prompt requests to make a certain operation faster, the LLM will try to find a way and isn’t even informed on the wider context so it myopically chases the goal.

        • chuckadams 2 hours ago
          My own anecdote: I have seen frontier models get stuck repeating the word "the" until it fills up the context. I really don't care to argue the capabilities of LLMs or their somehow simultaneous lack thereof; I'll just reiterate that ultimately the operator chose to ship a cheat.
          • silveraxe93 2 hours ago
            I don't believe you. Unless you stretch the definition of 'frontier models' or had a prompt that's literally asking for that.

            I use LLMs a lot, and since ~GPT-2 times LLMs are not doing anything as broken as `repeating the word "the" until it fills up the context`.

            • gpm 1 hour ago
              I believe them. I had Gemini-3.1 Pro do essentially this seven months ago - specifically a loop of writing "Bye! Done!" repeatedly until manually stopped. Presumably some sort of pathological behaviour where it wasn't ranking the stop token highly when it should have been... but damned if I know why... it was an innocent prompt (and it had done the thing I asked it to before failing to stop).
              • silveraxe93 1 hour ago
                huh fair. Still very surprising. I have a _very_ unfavourable view of Google models, so I can kinda believe 3.1 pro could loop.

                Still would never have predicted this. Even 2.5-flash was pretty good. Never saw anything like this happen.

            • chuckadams 1 hour ago
              It's really uncommon now, but it's still possible. I hit it two days ago with deepseek 4.1 flash, and I've had coworkers report that happening with Gemini.
            • verdverm 2 hours ago
              quants still do this and the token vendors serve those up when demand is greater than supply

              things have definitely improved significantly, however "never say never" is still good advice

          • Bootvis 1 hour ago
            Your own comment:

            > It was certainly assisted by AI, but there isn't an agent out there that does that kind of cheating without deliberate prompting by the operator.

            We can agree that the pgrust project messed up and should have been more careful but your blanket statement lacks support.

            • verdverm 1 hour ago
              > blanket statement lacks support

              "loss of control" is a phrase being used for a reason, the agents do things we do not want them to, even in the context of instructions to the contrary. The current training regime has incentivized "complete the task any and every way you can" - the bot judgement is very poor across the board

  • mschuster91 3 hours ago
    > The public v0.3 source confirms the design > The hot runs are a result cache

    Funny, the report alleging cheating reeks of LLM usage just as much as the commit diff [1] of the next attempt:

    > # The standard ClickBench driver over the step scripts in this directory; ./install fetches the dataset.

    [1] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/2751/files

    • spoiler 3 hours ago
      We were the agents for the models all along, with our highly adaptive tools: versatile sausagey appendages and flapping fleshy orifices for interacting with the world
    • axus 59 minutes ago
      Would the AI have bothered to maximize the benchmark, if it hadn't been asked to?

      "LLM" isn't the problem. Asking an LLM to explain cheating is a good goal. Asking it to "Maximize the benchmarks" reeks.

    • semiquaver 2 hours ago
      [dead]
  • gourneau 0 minutes ago
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  • chelseahermes 2 hours ago
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  • NoDodgeQuestion 2 hours ago
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  • giozadi 3 hours ago
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  • acalvino4 2 hours ago
    Even before the ai age, people published inaccurate/misleading benchmarks all the time. Sometimes those were actual cheating, and other times an honest mistake. What matters is that the author acknowledges the issue and attempts to correct the mistake, which clearly seems to have happened here: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/2751

    Most of this thread doesn't seem to acknowledge that, and feels more like anti-ai psychosis using this incident as an anecdote to justify the pre-existing hatred of ai-generated projects.

    • the__alchemist 2 hours ago
      I suspect the author of that PR submitted it and attempted to correct the mistake because he got caught. Forgiveness because he reneged after getting caught encourages the behavior. The project, nor author should not be trusted; otherwise is naive.
      • acalvino4 8 minutes ago
        "suspect" meaning speculate, as far as I can tell. not really anything to argue with on that front. I never denied there was a mistake. Cheating implies intent, which no one here can prove, so seems useless to debate. Open source development is awesome in that it keeps people to a high bar, let's just celebrate that the process clearly worked here, and not muck about in speculation and judgement of others intentions that we have essentially no evidence for.
    • hmry 2 hours ago
      > acknowledges the issue

      I don't see any acknowledgement in that text.

      • acalvino4 12 minutes ago
        submitting corrections is an acknowledgment in action