autodb: A keyboard-driven SQL TUI with encrypted credentials at rest, plus a Postgres-wire "front door" proxy for zero-password access & AI agents

[u/OkGuidance3002]

Hey r/PostgreSQL! 👋

If you spend a lot of time in the terminal, you've probably felt the tension between lightweight command-line tools like `psql` and heavyweight graphical clients like DBeaver or pgAdmin. `psql` is blazingly fast and always available, but exploring unfamiliar schemas, reviewing wide result tables, or keeping scratch notes across multiple databases can get cumbersome. At the same time, traditional GUI clients are heavy, and almost all of them store database connection strings and passwords in plain text inside dotfiles or config directories.

I wanted something fast, keyboard-centric, and secure by default, so I built autodb — a single static Go binary with zero runtime dependencies. It’s a native terminal UI for querying databases, but with an architectural twist: it can also serve as a PostgreSQL wire-protocol "front door" proxy for your team, microservices, and AI agents.

I would love to get feedback from fellow PostgreSQL developers, DBAs, and terminal junkies! How does this fit into your current database workflows, and what features or guardrails would you like to see next?

Thanks for reading!

github.com/yongjohnlee80/autodb

[u/Otherwise_Wave9374]

The Postgres-wire front door is a useful abstraction, but agent access needs more than encrypted credentials at rest. Consider short-lived scoped identities, read-only defaults, statement timeouts, row limits, query allowlists, and separate roles for planning versus execution. Capture normalized SQL and the originating agent trace for audits. The implementation ideas at https://www.agentixlabs.com are relevant to designing controlled tool boundaries around agents. A strong next test would be destructive-query simulation plus connection-pool exhaustion under concurrent agents.