Can a prompt replace Neon?

Build a 'branching' workflow for Postgres using dump-and-restore rather than attempting Neon's actual storage-layer copy-on-write engineering, which is genuinely out of scope for a personal project. Use a shell script or small Node CLI that takes a source database name, runs pg_dump against it, creates a new database with a branch-style name, and restores the dump into it — a 'branch' that's a real, independent, full copy, not an instant zero-copy one. Track branch metadata (source, created-at, purpose) in a small local SQLite file so you can list and manage branches. Add a 'merge' helper that's really just a reminder-and-checklist step: since these are independent database copies, not tracked diffs, there's no automatic merge — document manually what changed and re-apply it to the main database, or export a schema diff using a tool like migra for structural changes specifically. Add a cleanup command that drops old branch databases past a configurable age. Be explicit in the README that this trades Neon's actual innovation, instant branches regardless of database size, for a simpler mechanism that works fine at small-to-medium scale but gets slow on large databases, since a full dump-and-restore duration scales with data size. Do not attempt storage-layer copy-on-write branching — that's real distributed-systems engineering. Requires hosting for a Postgres instance; no other external service needed.