> No tool is ever a substitute for discipline.

My experience is exactly the opposite. Humans are too fallible for discipline to ever be reliable. If you want something done, automate it.

In my experience you're both right.

The enterprise wants everyone to be a jack of all trades and to understand everything. Part of the reason for the massive layering that takes place is so that things are compartmentalized and easier for an individual to pickup and put down as they're shuffled around from project to project. Standardization, documentation, consistency, and discipline are essential for enterprise developers to be able to quickly grok a project and make the necessary changes.

Automation also plays an important role because it allows less skilled and knowledgeable individuals of lower pay grades monitor the blinky lights and only call on the big boys when things fail.

ORMs let you structure your queries in a way that allows the app to understand them and analyze them, for sharding purposes. True, you can write SQL and then parse it yourself in a proxy, but why?

If your ORM allows you to drop down to SQL, which the parent claims all modern ORMs do, then you will still need that SQL parser in your ORM.

You can have a small subset of your queries in raw SQL and if you really need to shard them, you mark them up with structured metadata. But the rest would be automatically structured, analyzed and sharded.

Sure. So you can use the SQL parser from a mature, widely used library, or you can write your own. I know which option I would prefer, even if I was writing every single query by hand (not that I'd ever do that).