It’s 2026, Just Use Postgres

This article argues that most companies overcomplicate their infrastructure by adopting multiple specialized databases before they actually need them. Modern Postgres extensions now replicate many of the same core algorithms behind Elasticsearch, Pinecone, Redis, InfluxDB, MongoDB, and Kafka while dramatically reducing operational complexity. In the AI era, where agents and engineers need fast, forkable test environments, single-database architectures offer major advantages in speed, reliability, onboarding, and debugging. The piece positions Postgres as the practical default for modern engineering teams, with specialized databases reserved only for truly extreme scale or niche workloads.