People pick their tools per-project, so I would put it as "if you need to build a database with multiple consumers, AR will be a less valuable choice for any of

People pick their tools per-project, so I would put it as "if you need to build a database with multiple consumers, AR will be a less valuable choice for any of them, and you are thus much less likely to use it for that project". Right tool, right job, etc. On your primary question, since I've now played with "select foos from foos" on my PG database: I doubt it. When you do a query like Foo.where(foos: 'value').to_a or Foo.find_by_foos('value'), what you're basically doing is a "select foos.* from foos where foos='value'". If foos doesn't actually exist as an explicit column, that doesn't actually work: PG::UndefinedColumn: ERROR: column foos.foos does not exist So it's not like people have been writing queries like that expecting that the implicit column will do something (which I'm not sure would make sense anyway). Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it remains the case that you'd have to have explicitly created a column with the same name as your table to trigger this bug with otherwise working code. Edit: Of course, maybe there are more ways to trigger this bug than the ones provided in the email, and maybe they include queries where you might be relying on an implicit column for something else, such as selecting foos from foos. I'm just saying the cases listed in the email don't seem to be affected by the implicit column.