According to Simon Willison's latest research, a tricky developer problem just got some solutions: how do you programmatically map SQL query results back to their source columns? It matters if you want to annotate results with metadata about data lineage. The challenge is parsing complex queries with joins and CTEs. Willison set Claude Code on the problem and discovered three promising approaches: one using the apsw library, another leveraging ctypes to access SQLite's C-level column metadata, and a third using clever EXPLAIN analysis. The work could eventually enhance Datasette with richer data provenance information.

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