Mother of God. I can write JSON instead of a language designed for querying. What is the advantage? If I’m going to move up an abstraction layer, why not give me natural language? Lots of things turn a limited natural language grammar into SQL for you. What is JSON going to {do: for: {me}}?
I find it funny people are making fun of this while every ORM builds up an object representing the query and then compiles it to SQL. SQL but as a data structure you can manipulate has thousands of implementations because it solves a real problem. This time it's because LLMs have an easier time outputting complex JSON than SQL itself.
Something still has to convert the JSON to SQL but in this case, who is writing the JSON? An LLM?
Sometimes, it's easier or more efficient to just learn the shit you're working with instead of spending 1000x the compute fobbing it off to OpenAI. Even just putting a blob of SQL in a heredoc and using a prepared statement to parameterise it is good enough.
Beyond that, query building is just part of the functionality an ORM provides. The main chunk of it is the mapping of DB-level data structures to app-level models and vice-versa, particularly in an OOP context.
