Question

Should I let Cursor write my database migrations?

Solved · 12 views · asked 3 weeks ago by ines_data · edited

Cursor happily generates migration files. Twice it generated one that dropped a column with data. I caught it, but barely.

Now I read every migration line by line. Slow.

2 answers

Marked as helpful by the asker

olu_backend3 weeks ago · edited

Let it write them, never let it run them unattended. Three guardrails that cost nothing:

DROP and ALTER ... TYPE require a comment explaining why, enforced by a tiny CI grep.
Every migration runs against a copy of production first (pg_dump → local → migrate → smoke test).
Ask Cursor for the down migration too. If it cannot write the down, the up is destructive.

Reading migrations is the one place where slow is correct.

mira_dev3 weeks ago · edited

And separate 'expand' from 'contract': add the new column in one deploy, drop the old one a week later. Then a wrong drop is never same-day.