There is a client/server divide as you can see in the code examples. But I think the issue you're describing is a permissions problem, not a question of whether the compiler manages the network for you. There are traditional client/server apps with wide open permissions that allow all kinds of queries to pass through to a prod DB. Then again there are others that are heavily permissioned. Those are implementation details. If you _can_ control which code can run then you can write that code to _only_ run with certain constraints.
Small bugs overall, some of which the team already addressed. One Clojure specific that is outstanding is that dynamic variables are not rebound between electric and Clojure functions. Also, the compiler currently does not optimize the callstack so the whole app stream-renders in and out which has a cascading effect. None of these are deal breakers for me, they're being worked on and I'm glad the community can now help ship fixes and improvements.
Code is precompiled so you could add all your safeguards during compilation. Should not be too hard to enforce fo only precompiled code to run instead of exposing eval. However, I don't believe this is implemented at this stage.
I've been building with this for 2+ months. Debugging is fine (not great but when is it great? Especially in Clojure). It prints stacktraces in each env. Haven't found debugging harder than traditional client/server dev. But complexity has decreased thanks to it so less bugs.
I've been building with electric for several months now and it's hands down incredible! Why? I think most importantly because it allows for functional composition across the network (client/server–distributed systems more generally) while also ensuring payloads are as small as possible (only what functions in each env access) which translates to FAST.
IMO this is a paradigm shift similar to GC. No one wants to manage their garbage. No one wants to manage the network. It's grunt work. Let the compiler take care of it.
I've naively rewritten a re-frame (react/redux in js) app that started getting prohibitively slow due to a bunch of deserialization on the client in electric and the performance is outstanding! TBH I'm taking a break from additional UI work on the app to do research because I realized that with electric I can build something much more amazing than I thought possible before.
Caveat: the future will not be served on a silver platter. it's early days and there are some quirks