"tell me your db layout", which is pretty annoying when you're still developing the app and your layout is this in a flux

I agree. DBIx::Class gets around this (Rose::DB might too, I'm not sure) with auto loading schema.

FWIW, Rose::DB::Object can indeed inspect your database and create appropriate Perl classes, either in memory or on disk as *.pm files, including column data types, foreign keys, and other relationships between tables. There's an example in the tutorial.