AI agents write PostgreSQL like Python

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI agents write PostgreSQL like Python#

By Alexey Evlampiev

Give a coding agent a PostgreSQL-first backend to build and it will write you working SQL. It will also, with remarkable consistency, write you Python — Python’s exception-driven control flow, Python’s trust in casts, Python’s habit of validating wherever the code happens to be — transliterated into PL/pgSQL, where those idioms carry costs the agent never sees.

This article is a field report. It draws on two internal reviews of a production line-of-business backend built database-first — a few hundred SQL files across roughly two dozen domains, with a kernel/handler split and a thin HTTP gateway — where AI coding agents wrote most of the SQL. The reviews rated every finding and verified each against the code before reporting it. The failure modes below are the ones that recurred; the discipline in the second half is what the same codebase used, in its healthy majority, to avoid them.

Test PostgreSQL migrations before COMMIT

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Test PostgreSQL migrations before COMMIT#

By Alexey Evlampiev

Most migration pipelines test before deployment or after commit. PostgreSQL allows a third checkpoint: after applying the change, but before committing it. Lint and rehearsal catch what they can in advance; integration suites catch what they can afterwards. The checkpoint in between is the only one where the real target database — with whatever drift it has accumulated — is in its migrated state while rollback is still one statement away.

Articles on pgmi

AI agents write PostgreSQL like Python

AI agents write PostgreSQL like Python#

Test PostgreSQL migrations before COMMIT

Test PostgreSQL migrations before COMMIT#