LWN reports on a blog post by PostgreSQL core team member Peter Eisentraut reflecting on the unusually high number of features that have been pulled from the upcoming PostgreSQL 19 release since the beta period began. Eisentraut writes that some reverted features had significant architectural defects that could not have been fixed quickly during beta, but that there was also a long tail of relatively harmless edge-case issues. In earlier cycles such problems would have surfaced gradually and been fixed over years; LLM-assisted code review now finds them much faster, leaving maintainers ‘staring at a list of like forty defect reports’ that cannot all be worked through before release. Most of the affected features were written long before LLM-assisted review was useful, meaning the effective quality bar rose after they were committed. He adds that the situation is, for the most part, not due to ‘vibe coding’, and LWN notes it covered the unusually large number of PostgreSQL 19 bug fixes in September.
Eisentraut: The reverts will continue until morale improves
LWN reports on a blog post by PostgreSQL core team member Peter Eisentraut reflecting on the unusually high number of features that have been pulled from the upcoming PostgreSQL 19 release since the beta period began. Eisentraut writes that some reverted features had significant architectural defects that could not have been fixed quickly during beta, but that there was also a long tail of relatively harmless edge-case issues. In earlier cycles such problems would have surfaced gradually and been fixed over years; LLM-assisted code review now finds them much faster, leaving maintainers 'staring at a list of like forty defect reports' that cannot all be worked through before release. Most of the affected features were written long before LLM-assisted review was useful, meaning the effective quality bar rose after they were committed. He adds that the situation is, for the most part, not due to 'vibe coding', and LWN notes it covered the unusually large number of PostgreSQL 19 bug fixes in September.
Source: Lwn