Pgbot: A 5.9 MB read-only Postgres tool for humans and agents

sashash

Hi HN, I’m Alex, a longtime PostgreSQL and Rails/Go/Rust engineer. I built pgbot because I often needed a quick explanation of what was happening inside a database without first deploying a dashboard, collector, telemetry stack, or separate database. pgbot is an open-source 5.9 MB Go binary that connects directly to PostgreSQL and returns useful findings in seconds: pgbot inspect — database health pgbot queries — expensive queries pgbot indexes — risky and unused indexes pgbot ask — answers for humans and agents MCP — lets coding agents inspect PostgreSQL directly The diagnostic findings are computed deterministically in Go. They are not invented by an LLM. pgbot is also read-only by design: it inspects the database but never applies changes. An agent can explain and prioritize the evidence, but it cannot silently modify production through pgbot. Source: https://github.com/pgrundev/pgbot I’d especially appreciate feedback about missing diagnostic checks, false positives, and the read-only safety model for coding agents.

sashash

Read-only by design: no DDL, DML, or automatic fixes.

sashash

It works anywhere you have a standard PostgreSQL connection string.

znnajdla

I don't understand what this tool offers over simply querying pg directly and reading pg logs?

michael-sumner

Be careful as it might be telemetrying the database. How do we know that it is not?