Neon — serverless Postgres as a platform

Neon is Postgres with three platform features the engine doesn't have: a serverless driver that talks over HTTP/WebSocket (so you can query from edge runtimes), built-in connection pooling, and copy-on-write branching that makes a fork of production data appear instantly. This skill owns that platform layer. The Postgres engine underneath — schema, indexes, EXPLAIN, RLS, zero-downtime DDL — is identical to any Postgres 16 and belongs to ../postgresdb/SKILL.md. Don't re-derive engine craft here; connect correctly and branch correctly.

When to use / When NOT to use

When to use:

• Code imports @neondatabase/serverless, or DATABASE_URL points at *.neon.tech / *.aws.neon.tech.
• Connecting from Vercel (Edge/Node), Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda, or any serverless/edge function — choosing HTTP neon() vs WebSocket Pool.
• Setting up branching: dev branch off production, a branch per PR in CI, neonctl usage, the Neon + Vercel preview integration.
• Neon-specific symptoms: cold start after scale-to-zero, "too many connections" despite being serverless, pooled-vs-direct string confusion, autoscaling CU sizing/cost.
• Picking the connection string for migrations (direct) vs app queries (pooled).