The Django ORM makes migrating database state (a hard problem) super easy. It also makes GROUP BY queries (a relatively easy problem) oddly difficult. Use an ORM where it helps, use SQL where it doesn't.
I personally don’t think DB migrations are that difficult, and I’d say they can be done a lot safer without an ORM. I’ve also never found an ORM that was easier to learn and overall easier to use than SQL. I’ve never understood how ORMs became so popular, I don’t get how somebody can look at how opaque and complicated they are and conclude that learning an ORM is easier than just learning SQL.
100%. ORMs are good for basic queries but the messes I have seen written joining 20 plus tables with conditions and left joins, etc, oof. Just use SQL, it’s much cleaner and easier to maintain.
Because it's not about avoiding SQL (although that's a benefit), it's that you also get forms for free, view classes, easy APIs, validation, a free admin, free docs and a large pool of potential employees who all understand the foundations of your app.
You don’t get any of that for free. You get it at the cost of working with the abstractions, which can be very high. Your RDBMS is not an OOP/multi-paradigm system like Python is (or whatever other language). Its objects interact differently, and it has different access patterns. Any system you use to try and ignore these differences is just going to create a host of other problems for you, especially this idea that it will allow you to simply ignore database administration.
With LLMs I've managed to ignore these issues so far on my django app with 100+ views and 50+ models. So yeah, I get that for free. My app is more complex than a simple CRUD app, but still at least 90% CRUD.
To be fair it sounds like LLMs are managing that for you. You’ve got two (mostly) black boxes stacked on top of one another here. You’ve avoided managing your DB and avoided managing your ORM. What will you do when something eventually goes wrong? Ask the LLM to fix it?
Yeah. Or apply my brain. Reviewing LLM-written code is no different to working with code from a colleague or library. It's the best of both worlds, certainly while iterating quickly on the MVP & early stages.
