TIL you actually don’t need structure.sql for Ecto! In that case, discarding migrations on a large running app seems like a not-always-good practice, right? FWIW, my experience with Ecto has always been in joining existing codebases that are already big.

I do also want to add that Django can kind of do the reverse of auto-generating migrations: it can “inspect” an existing database and generate Python classes that allow you to use the Django API as if you wrote those classes yourself: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/howto/legacy-databases...

Of course, the feature is not going to be perfect, especially if a team has been using odd naming conventions in the legacy database, but it seems helpful at least in theory.