The benefits: you write code faster, automatically uniform and the result is “dumb” and less abstract AKA easy to debug and modify. Tedium/boilerplate is gone, you focus in the overall model.
The costs: you think more up front, you have to see the result first (hand written). It’s easy to see common patterns too early.
With some patience, caution and experience some of the costs can be mitigated.
The articles example would imply in our use case:
1) add one key to the schema (which is database independent), which will generate encoders, decoders, apis (to work with the data structure, not in network-sense) automatically
2) add the key in the views you want to add it (when updating/reading or more complex network apis)
3) specify how the key is retrieved/saved in the use cases (controller-like)
4) use the key in the frontend.
It took me longer to write this post from mobile than it would've taken me do the first 3 steps.
I’m on my first project that resembles your description, and I _really_ like it (so far).
Auto-documentation is also a big plus, imo. Our “truth schema” also outputs OpenAPI specs, markdown docs, etc with zero added effort (past writing inline comments). Love it.
Notice that we use a custom typescript compiler (tsplus), we make use of some quite advanced typescript, and we add codegeneration via eslint on top of it.
Took me 3 months here before it started making sense, but then it started clicking.
A large code base that was auto-generated and then subtly modified in some places is hard to refactor, and if you need to change the signature of a function that is used thousands of time across the generated code, you are in for a long ride.
I routinely generate 80% of the code needed to implement a typical business application.