I first heard about Ent on HN about 2 years ago. At the time I was evaluating every ORM in Go to find something that would fit the bill and Ent happened to be exactly what we needed. We've now been using it for 2 years and it's been one of the best bets we made on a technology choice.

Things that have worked really well:

* Auto DB migrations using Ent+Atlas. Ent implements a lot of great low level defaults that I just don't want to need to think about (foreign key constraints, indexes, naming of join tables etc)

* Generating our GraphQL API from Ent Schema

* Generating Protobuf definitions for internal tools to talk to (now using Buf for the actual tooling, but having the protos generated saved a huge lot of time).

* Being able to quickly craft really complex multi-edge joins without really thinking through the SQL allows for quick implementation of new features.

* Query optimizations such as using WINDOW clauses for pagination in GraphQL queries (I wouldn't have even thought this was possible).

* The generated code is quite a lot of lines, but it's really nicely structured and idiomatic, making it easy to extend.

There's been heaps of other neat finds along the way, but that's a summary.

Shout out to Ariel and Rotem for being excellent stewards of the Ent community and helping us solve some complex problems along the way.