Why I Still Reach for Plain SQL Before Any ORM

I've used Prisma, Hibernate, Sequelize, and TypeORM. They are excellent tools. They are also lies — beautiful, productive lies about what is actually happening to your data.

The lie becomes expensive when you're debugging a query that takes 8 seconds on production but 40ms in development. You crack open the ORM's generated SQL and find seventeen JOINs where three would suffice.

I'm not anti-ORM. I use Prisma daily. But my rule is: understand the SQL your ORM generates. Know how indexes work.

The engineer who understands all the layers is the one who can debug any of them.