I Spent Two Years Deleting My Backend. This Is What's Left

What happens when you stop writing controllers, services, repositories and mappers - and let PostgreSQL be the backend. MIT-licensed, and yes, I built it. Full disclosure right away: I built the thing I'm about to show you. It's called NpgsqlRest , it's MIT-licensed, there is no paid tier, no telemetry, no "book a demo" button. I'm just a guy who spent two years deleting layers from his stack and now wants to show someone the hole where the backend used to be. The standard pattern The standard data access pattern for modern business applications looks like this: UI → Fetch → Controller → Service → Repository → ORM → SQL → Database Seven arrows. And if you look closely at what most of those layers actually do - they take data from one side and pass it to the other side, slightly renamed. The Controller maps the request to a DTO. The Service passes it to the Repository. The Repository asks the ORM nicely. The ORM generates SQL that you then inspect in a log because you don't trust it (correctly). We built entire careers on maintaining this pipeline. I know because I did, for decades. But once you realize database-aware tests are trivial to wire up, you can drop the Repository. Once you get good at SQL, you can drop the ORM. And then you look at the Controller and realize it's just boring glue code that ships bytes between HTTP and the database. Glue code can be automated. So: UI → Database That's it. That's the architecture. Show me or it didn't happen Fine. This is a file called users.sql . Not a function, not a stored procedure - a plain SQL file sitting in your repo: /* HTTP GET /users/ @authorize admin, user @cached @cache_expires_in 30sec @timeout 5min @param $1 department_id text */ select id , name , email , role from users where $ 1 is null or department_id = $ 1 ; You run npgsqlrest (a single native executable, no runtime to install) pointed at your PostgreSQL, and: $ curl -s 'localhost:8080/users/?department_id=1' | jq [ { "id": 1, "name": "Alice", "email":