Someone turned PostgreSQL into a city you can walk around in

This article was featured in the July 31, 2026, edition of the IBM Think newsletter. Get it in your inbox.

If you’ve ever sat down and tried to understand how a database works, you know the explanations usually involve lots of arrows and boxes and other unpleasantries that somehow make everything feel even more abstract.

Software engineer Nik Samokhvalov wondered if there was a better way. Instead of yet another architecture diagram, he built PGSimCity, a SimCity-inspired visualizer that turns PostgreSQL, the open-source database behind countless websites and business applications, into a place you can actually explore.

You can tour the whole thing from above, like a city builder, with gaming-style WASD keys. As you roam, you’ll see transactions move through the streets in the form of small, orderly rock-like animations, while background processes carry on their own routines in the distance. Or you can trigger different database events and watch the city respond. Samokhvalov’s GitHub lists the full set of controls, including a walk mode that drops you street-level into something closer to Blade Runner than SimCity, with data flying past at eye height.

By Samokhvalov’s own account on Hacker News, the project started as a single prompt to Claude, driven out of curiosity about what the model could do, and grew into a whopping 3.86 billion tokens of AI-assisted coding. (Not cheap!) Maybe that’s why PGSimCity’s pace is so unrelenting: a frenetic sim designed to show how databases think was itself designed by a different kind of thinking machine.

The build is open source, so theoretically it could be adapted to explain other kinds of opaque tech: one Hacker News commenter suggested Kubernetes and cloud computing. Eh, why not? We’ve spent decades trying to explain invisible software with awkward diagrams…maybe it makes more sense to build places you can wander through instead.