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10 — Non-Goals

What we are deliberately not building. Listed here so they don't creep in.

Not a BI tool​

No dashboards. No saved queries. No charts. No "share this result with my team." Agents are the read-out; if humans want a dashboard, they have Metabase / Superset / Looker / whatever they already use. Adding even one chart starts a feature treadmill that ends in us competing with Tableau and losing.

Not a query builder​

No visual SQL editor. No "drag a table onto a canvas." The agent writes the SQL; the human writes prompts. If a person wants to write SQL by hand against the gateway, that's a sign they should be using psql with their own credential, not this product.

Not a credential vault​

We use a secret manager; we don't replace one. The gateway is not Vault, not 1Password, not AWS Secrets Manager. If you have one of those, point us at it. If you don't, get one first.

Not a SaaS​

There is no hosted version, no control plane, no "sign up." Every install is self-hosted, single-tenant, in the customer's own infra. We will never see your queries.

Not multi-tenant​

One install = one organization. Two organizations sharing one gateway is explicitly unsupported. If you have two organizations, run two gateways.

Not a write-heavy tool​

Writes are possible (see 06-permissions) but the system is shaped around read-only debugging. Migrations, data corrections, bulk updates — those belong in your existing CI/CD or runbooks, not in an agent's tool call.

Not a database​

The state Postgres is internal plumbing for sessions + audit. It's not exposed, not extensible, not queryable through the gateway's own MCP tools. Don't try to use it as application storage.

Not an AI product​

There is no embedded LLM, no vector store, no "natural language to SQL" feature inside the gateway. The agent calling us has all of that. Our job is plumbing.

Not a tool for end users​

The user of this system is an engineer running an AI agent. Not a customer-success rep checking an order. Not a finance analyst pulling numbers. Not a marketing person querying campaigns. Those use cases are real but they need a different product with different guardrails.

Not "agentic" anything​

We don't run agents. We don't host agents. We don't coordinate agents. We expose tools to whatever agent the user is already running.

Not a network proxy​

We don't tunnel arbitrary DB protocol traffic. We expose specific MCP tools that internally run specific queries. "Just let me connect to the DB through you" is the thing this product replaces; it's not a feature we add later.

Not an admin UI​

Permissions live in YAML in git. There is no /admin web UI for editing groups, granting access, or rotating credentials. The platform/infra teams who deploy this prefer config-as-code and we are not going to talk them out of it.