You can go deeper and model a queue as a ring-esque buffer with a write head (can just be a serial id) and a read head. The read head starts at the same place as the write head and advances only up to the write head and no further via nextval(). The main benefit is you now remove the lock contention as many workers attempt to dequeue at once.

The super advanced version of this is pgque - https://pgque.dev/ - but that’s more like Kafka in Postgres. I wouldn’t go there if you don’t know the Kafka model already and you want it.

FWIW I use atuin (https://atuin.sh/) and am reasonably happy with it, especially the infinite capacity & snapiness. Ignoring the sync features, I believe it's also sqlite backed when running in local-only mode.

The readme starts by saying how the author used to use atuin, and why they wrote stinkpot as a less featureful alternative.

AFAIK it is always backed by a sqlite DB. That way the sync just populates the DB and the completion process doesn't care (or wait for) the central source.

So can it run without AI? They promote their own AI on the website and that is really the last thing I want in my Shell