As a rookie starting in software development, especially in the age of AI, I could easily skip the learning phase and jump straight into building.
But my experience during my undergraduate years taught me something: shaky foundations and an inadequate understanding of the tools you're working with will eventually come back to bite you — sometimes in ways you least expect.
After setting up my development environment and finalizing my database design, I initialized Prisma 8 in my DMS project.
Now, here's the thing about AI: if you don't provide enough context about what you're working on, its suggestions can be misleading or unsuitable for your setup.
ChatGPT and I brainstormed and came up with this folder structure for my project:
dms-v2/
├── src/
│ ├── auth/
│ ├── users/
│ ├── academic-session/
│ ├── documents/
│ ├── providers/
│ ├── common/
│ ├── app.module.ts
│ └── main.ts
│
├── logs/
├── test/
├── prisma/
├── package.json
└── ...
Notice that the prisma/ directory is outside src/? Good.
But Prisma 8 initially generated the directory inside src/. And you know what I did?
Yeah, you guessed right. I moved it to the project root. 😭
I thought everything was fine and continued writing my database models in contract.prisma.
I also set up a global Prisma module in another src/prisma/ directory so the generated Prisma client could be accessed through dependency injection across my NestJS modules.
At this point, I had two directories with different responsibilities: one at the project root for my Prisma schema and configuration, and another inside src/ for the generated client and Prisma service.
Then the problems started.
The first issue: NestJS compilation
I hit a compilation error when starting the NestJS application because a TypeScript file sat outside the directory covered by my TypeScript compilation configuration.
The second issue: Prisma couldn't find my schema
Prisma was also looking for the schema in its configured location, but I'd moved the relevant directory. As a result, subsequent Prisma commands couldn't find the schema where they expected it.
I had created these problems by changing the folder structure without fully understanding how Prisma's configuration and NestJS's compilation setup worked together.
The lesson
AI is a capable tool, but I believe it's only as good as the person using it. So, I try to understand the tools I'm working with and build a solid foundation in the field so I can evaluate the solutions AI suggests rather than accepting them blindly.
Reading through the Prisma 8 documentation helped me resolve these issues. It also helped me tackle subsequent problems, including cases where AI suggested Prisma ORM queries based on older versions.
Documentation might not always be the most exciting thing to read, but sometimes it's exactly what I need.
And that's one lesson I'm taking away from this experience.