Why Complex SQL Remains Hard to Maintain Even in the Age of AI Coding Tools

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A technical analysis argues that SQL's declarative nature causes business logic to be buried in syntax rather than expressed explicitly, making complex queries difficult to read and modify. A real-world example shows how a production query merging time intervals would require a near-complete rewrite just to accommodate a minor rule change. The author contends that code comments fail to solve this problem because they drift out of sync as code evolves, and SQL's deeply nested structure makes commenting impractical. AI-assisted coding is also critiqued, since generated queries are committed without the original prompts, leaving future developers to reverse-engineer logic from scratch. The proposed solution is to permanently fuse specifications with SQL so that updating a spec automatically regenerates the corresponding query, keeping documentation and code in sync.

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