How to Avoid Common Pitfalls With JPA and Kotlin

Jakarta Persistence (JPA) was designed for Java, creating friction with Kotlin's defaults like final classes, immutable properties, and null safety. To build reliable persistence layers, avoid data classes for entities, use regular open classes with mutable properties, configure the no-arg and all-open compiler plugins, stick to field-based access, and make all entity fields nullable (including primary keys with generated values). Default values in constructors won't apply when loading from the database. Kotlin 2.2 improves annotation placement, and IntelliJ IDEA 2026.1 will detect these issues automatically with inspections and quick-fixes.