GeezerVison

Make It Work, Make It Right, Make It…​

There is a piece of advice, usually attributed to Kent Beck, that almost every developer has heard at some point:

Make it work, make it right, make it fast.

Most people read it as a warning about premature optimization. But I always feel it describes the life of any idea that other people are supposed to use. And it happens to describe the MCP series I have been writing for more than a year.

About once a week, a thread shows up in r/node or r/typescript that ZenStack is a genuinely good answer to. Someone has a CRUD app, they're adding multi-tenancy, and they've just realized they're about to write where: { orgId: ctx.orgId } in forty places and get it wrong in one of them. That's my thread. I built a TypeScript ORM with access control in the schema partly because I got tired of that exact problem.

Every ORM gives you contains, startsWith, and endsWith on string fields, and for a while that feels like enough. Then a product manager asks for "search that just works" on a product catalog, and you realize how blunt those operators really are. contains: 'iphone' won't match "iPhones". It won't match "iphne" from a sloppy mobile keyboard. It won't rank a name match higher than a description match. And once your table gets large enough, ILIKE '%term%' quietly stops being free.

ZenStack v3.7 ships two new operators that solve different halves of this problem — full-text search for natural-language content and fuzzy search for short, typo-prone fields — both expressed in the same familiar ORM query API you're already using.

Is MCP Dead Because of Agent Skills?​

It sometimes feels like AI is not just disrupting the old world, like SaaS, but also consuming its own children in the new one. Less than a year ago, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) was the industry's "golden child", with every vendor and platform scrambling to integrate it. Then, just 6 months later, the spotlight shifted again—this time to Agent Skills, the younger sibling that seems to have stolen much of the thunder from MCP.

If you've built a TypeScript backend in the last few years, you've probably used Prisma. It earned its place as the default choice — a clean schema language, an intuitive query API, and type safety that felt almost magical at the time.

But the TypeScript ORM space has quietly matured. Drizzle emerged as a serious alternative for developers who felt Prisma was too opinionated. And ZenStack v3 just completed a full rewrite that positions it not just as an ORM, but as a full-stack data layer.

Three tools, three distinct bets on what "great database access" means in 2026. This post breaks them down so you can pick the right one for your project.

We're in the "vibe coding" era. AI coding agents — Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Devin, and their growing kin — are no longer writing toy snippets. They're scaffolding entire features, refactoring modules, and wiring up API endpoints in seconds. The promise is intoxicating: describe what you want, get working code.

The reality is more nuanced. These agents are prolific, but not infallible. They hallucinate API signatures. They skip edge cases. They introduce subtle bugs that compile cleanly and pass a first glance. And crucially, they do all of this fast — far faster than any human code review can keep up with.

So here's the question that matters more than ever: what catches the mistakes an agent makes?

Prisma won the hearts of many TypeScript developers with its excellent developer experience - the elegant schema language, the intuitive query API, and the unmatched type-safety. However, as time went by, its focus shifted, and innovation in the ORM space slowed down considerably. Many successful OSS projects indeed struggle to meet the ever-growing demands, but you'll be surprised to find that many seemingly fundamental features that have been requested for years are still missing today, such as:

• Define type of content of Json field #3219
• Support for Polymorphic Associations #1644
• Soft deletes (e.g. deleted_at) #3398

MCP is trending in AI, But…​

MCP(Model Context Protocol) is undoubtedly one of the most exciting trends in AI now. Not only is everyone talking about it, but everyone is also rushing to develop their version to secure a seat at the table of the AI era. Don't feel so? Guess how many MCP servers are listed in MCP Server Directory ?

Is SaaS Really Dead?​

Several months ago, the internet was abuzz with the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying, “SaaS is dead.”

The conversation started with a question from Bill Gurley about whether Satya was worried that newer startups are building applications with an AI-first approach, which could obfuscate traditional infrastructure like Excel or CRM. Here is Satya’s response:

In the previous post, we discussed the new extensibility opportunities of the core ORM by adopting Kysely. In this post, we'll continue exploring the plan for v3's new plugin system that allows you to deeply customize ZenStack's behavior in a clean and maintainable way.