Now that Rails uses Ruby to express database structure (migrations), it seems silly to me that we can’t just express that right in the model classes. Something like this:

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class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  fields do |f|
    f.add :first_name, :string
    f.add :last_name, :string
  end
end

Doing this would not only make models more cohesive, but it would make it easier to specify a lot about models without ever touching the database.

We’d need a means of discovering necessary migrations on the fly, and that could get very tricky very quickly, but I think it’s worth exploring.