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Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault

http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2026/10/postgres-19-is-late-and-its-ais-fault.html
42•soheilpro•1d ago

Comments

droppedasbaby•1d ago
I guess the real challenge is figuring out how to scale verification, cause discovery isn't the bottleneck anymore. Generating more bug reports doesn't necessarily translate into faster fixes if the same small group of maintainers still have to validate the reports, review fixes, etc.
c0_0p_•4m ago
Probably true if development accelerates because of AI, but if it's reasonably stable then hopefully new bug reports will plateau.
hopa•25m ago
I feel like AI is amazing for read only “search” tasks (query this, look for bugs, find vulnerabilities) but it’s not quite as good for “write” tasks like “add this feature”. Search tasks are easily verified, code changes are much harder to verify
simonw•23m ago
I'm not sure about that. The most common error for a search task is omission, and that's really hard to spot - how do you verify that some answer that should be there wasn't included?

For things like "add this feature" you can verify by trying out the feature and seeing if it works. Of course, that won't tell you if there are edge-case bugs or security holes or other design flaws, but you can get to a positive confirmation of the happy case pretty quickly.

27183•14m ago
> The most common error for a search task is omission, and that's really hard to spot

NP-Hard, even[1]!

[1] https://www.i-programmer.info/news/112-theory/3830-physics-i...

ipdashc•23m ago
I've slowly been coming around to this viewpoint as well. It's interesting that there's so much focus on using AI to write code (which, don't get me wrong, does work well but makes you lose track of what you're building so quickly) and seemingly less on analyzing code, finding bugs, etc
MBCook•18m ago
But it DIDNT “write that feature”. They made it extremely clear on the delay announcement the code was written without AI.

AI’s only part of this was helping review things and finding bugs. More bugs, bugs that would have been found later, whatever.

Postgres did not have a slop issue and it’s wrong for people to insinuate it.

bheztio•17m ago
"Add this feature" is often too vague, unless it's yet another button to a list of buttons. If you want your feature in a particular way, you need to specify it. If you're not even sure what you want, it's granted you won't be satisfied by the result, so you need to spend time figuring that out first. In other words, they're definitely great for write tasks too, but it does require more effort from the operator to formulate the problem.
vatsachak•8m ago
What? AI can't easily implement features. Just write a spec, ask if to expand it and then ask it to implement it
ltbarcly3•23m ago
I have found major bugs in late beta's of postgres long before AI came along. I found a bug where malformed json would segfault the entire server (a segfault in a server process forces the entire cluster to shut down by design) when using jsonb in a release candidate once. They fixed it rather than ripping the entire feature out.

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20140818195634.2543.56...

It seems quite possible that someone wants to make it seem like LLMs are causing problems by over-reacting to things that could just be fixed, or delay the release slightly (or maybe waiting until late before a release to kill features they don't like?) Whatever it is, this seems like a dysfunctional process.

StilesCrisis•20m ago
If you are at the RC stage and still uncovering segfaults, "rip the feature out" is probably the only choice.
benjiro29•13m ago
Maybe its more a issue that X amount of people have more work to fix discovered issues. So the new features have not undergone the same level of testing as before.

And instead of releasing substandard new features, they rather focus on getting rid of the backlog and have more time to test.

LLMs are in effect directly responsible for this (in a positive way by finding a ton of issues that can be security issues). Reality is with LLMs now in the world, more work needs to be done on existing software as their ability to find bugs/security weaknesses is strong.

When the old bugs/security weaknesses are fixed, things will go back to a more normal release schedule.

ltbarcly3•5m ago
Are the features bad by design? Like are they bad even if they work perfectly because they add bad abstractions to pg's SQL syntax, or are just broken in how they are supposed to work? If so the process is dysfunctional to let them get this far before noticing.

Are the features designed well (from a product perspective) but implemented poorly? Again, the process is dysfunctional to let them get this far before it notices.

Were there known issues with these that were planned to be fix, but the fixes didn't happen in time? That would make sense and it happens, but how is an LLM making that worse? LLMs in the worst case let you get the same work done more quickly, because you can always get the work done as quickly as you ever could by just not using an LLM. So the strongest thing you might say here is that you thought LLMs would let you get a feature into shape before it was too late, and for whatever reason that was overly optimistic.

27183•23m ago
I'm not very positive on the social, technical, or intellectual impact of AI on software development. Actually, that's understating it. I think AI is basically cancer for the mind. That said, this framing gave me pause:

> The long-term picture is less clear and in some ways more troubling: given that we have forty years of bugs that humans were unable to find but LLMs are quite capable of discovering, how are we ever going to catch up, and how will PostgreSQL continue to innovate? Right now, I’m not sure. What I do know is that I, and many others, are working really hard to figure it out.

Two thoughts:

1. If the signal quality is high--the bug reports are generally valid, the submitted fixes are generally viable (if needing some attention)--then this all seems great. Pause innovation for a while, you can afford it. Focus on burning down the bug count, and resume feature development when things are more stable.

2. If the signal quality isn't good, or is sufficiently mixed that a lot of time is being wasted on low quality contributions... that's more complex. I don't know what to do about that. Maybe stop accepting contributions from unknown contributors? No idea.

From the post I'm not sure whether they're experiencing a (1) or a (2). If it's a (1) that's really interesting, and gives me some glimmer of hope for the future.

meow9•11m ago
I’m still amazed that with all the vibe coding, no one has created a Postgres alternative
nfriedly•10m ago
Why would they? Postgres is free and does an amazing job.
spolitry•7m ago
Also Postgres has enjoyed decades of debugging.
scrollaway•6m ago
To be honest I would love for someone to work on the structuring of pg_dump for example, which is entirely driven by regexes and binary structures. It’s awful and absolutely not programmable - a real shame.
sa46•8m ago
Many recent relational databases speak the Postgres wire protocol. For wholesale replacement, pgrust is a recent, contentious contender.
gnabgib•5m ago
I hope you don't believe this, PGRust has fallen far from grace. Wire protocol support is useful (other than said recommendation)

Remove pgrust: the entry is cheating (per-query kernels and result caching) (197 points, 10 days ago, 166 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205816

CharlesW•10m ago
> This year is going to be different. PostgreSQL 19 most likely won’t be released until November… […] So, what happened? The short answer is that LLMs happened. […] There’s a huge amount of code, and that code contains a huge number of bugs. […] What’s different now is that it’s become vastly easier to find those bugs.

This seems…good?

That it might disrupt the project's "traditional" release cadence a bit doesn't seem terribly bad in light of the alternative, which is shipping another major update with bugs which have apparently haunted the codebase for some time.

tibbar•9m ago
I did a little AI-assisted bug-hunting in Postgres this summer in between jobs, and the haul was staggering. Multiple serialization anomalies, foreign key integrity issues, planner correctness bugs. Various CVE-worthy vulnerabilities. An unfixable timezone bug. The list got so long that I had to triage what I even had time to report, and settled for a dozen or two out of hundreds of candidates. Now imagine the entire world doing this.
TomatoCo•6m ago
Someone tried. https://jepsen.io/analyses/particledb-1.1.4

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