This article dives into the hidden failures that crop up when your database leaves the ideal “happy path.” It covers contention, slow queries, race conditions, stale reads, retries and live migrations, and shows how production realities can break simple transactional code.

The article argues that large language models lack the structured data, integrity constraints, and deterministic processes that business software provides. Instead of replacing software, LLMs will plug into existing systems via protocols like MCP, serving as a flexible front end while databases and rule engines remain the backbone.