Three days before going open source, I deleted my parser's smartest feature. 333 lines. 6 functions....
A PostgreSQL parser deleted 333 lines of code that guessed foreign-key relationships using naming patterns, because wrong guesses fail silently. APIs requiring schema metadata and returning nil when uncertain beat heuristics—the principle 'Parse, don't guess' applies to production code.
Three days before going open source, I deleted my parser's smartest feature.
333 lines. 6 functions. 12 passing tests. All green, all clever, all gone.
The feature worked. That was the problem.
The feature that knew too much
My PostgreSQL parser (valk-postgres-parser) extracts structure from SQL text: tables, columns, joins, filters. One of its analysis functions did something more ambitious. Give it a query like this:
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