Why I Dropped Prisma for Raw SQL on This Project

I started this portfolio with Prisma. By the end, I had deleted it. Here is the honest post-mortem.

What Prisma gave me

• Type-safe queries
• Migrations
• A nice DX for simple CRUD

What it cost me

• A build step in CI
• Extra bundle weight in the edge runtime
• Schema drift when I wanted to tweak one column

The replacement

A 40-line lib/db.ts that wraps mysql2 with query, queryOne, and execute. That is it. Every server action in the app uses it. No generated client, no migrations folder.

Would I do it again?

For a bigger app — no, Prisma still wins. For a personal site with ~5 tables — absolutely.