Been seeing a lot of hype around "AI-powered" migration tools lately. Tried one of the newer ones on a production postgres instance (staging first, obviously) and honestly felt like I wasted an afternoon. It generated a perfectly fine migration script that i could have written in 15 minutes myself. No handling for the gnarly stuff like backfilling columns with complex logic or managing foreign key constraints during the transition. Ended up hand-coding it anyway.
The real work in zero-downtime migrations isn't the schema changes. it's the application logic, the dual-write logic, the feature flags. None of these tools touched that. Just feels like marketing around what's already solved by standard migration tooling. Am i missing something or are people just buying the "ai" label.
Nina Okafor
ML engineer working on LLMs and RAG pipelines
Yeah, that's been my experience too. The AI tools are great at the straightforward stuff - adding columns, basic index creation - but they bail on anything requiring domain knowledge about your data.
The real bottleneck in migrations isn't the SQL generation, it's understanding the constraints. What does "backfill this column" actually mean for your users. Are there concurrent writes. Do you need dual-write logic first. That's where you need a human thinking through the problem.
I've found these tools most useful as a starting point for documentation or boilerplate, not as a replacement for the migration planning work. But yeah, if you're hoping to hand something off and not think about it, you're going to have a bad time.