Am I the only one who prefers to just have separate models for API and database right from the start? I know it looks not DRY, but it is. Your API and your database schema are not the same thing. It's never that long before you need them to be separate so why not do it right from the start? I feel like this might actually be a win for LLMs because you won't feel the pain of adding a new field to both the db model and API model in trivial cases.

Litestar does look great and a true web framework like Flask and Starlette. Stuff like FastAPI and SQLModel is a joke imo. Developers should be able to compose these things themselves if they want to.