PostgreSQL 19 Is Late

“All software contains bugs.”

That’s a quote from Robert Haas’s “Postgres 19 is late” post. He goes on to say that PostgreSQL has lots of bugs in it. It’s the way it’s been for a codebase that’s over 40 years old. He goes on to note that it’s easier to find bugs with LLMs, and easier to fix them. It’s not, however, as easy to do the latter as the former.

The impact on PostgreSQL 19 is that they’ve had to revert a number of features much later in the process because the humans were reviewing and fixing bugs found by LLMs. This effort delayed other work and has affected the release.

As someone who primarily works with SQL Server, I’m not that worried about delays in PostgreSQL or other platforms. I think it’s a fine choice, but I’m focused on SQL Server, which I think is more of a joy to work with.

However, there are a few interesting things in here. First, I think SQL Server has had a lot of bugs found lately (likely by AI LLMs). I recently wrote about the frequency of patches, which is higher in 2026. This is probably due to LLM code review, and that’s good. It also means we likely will have more patches coming, not just in SQL Server or PostgreSQL but also in our other systems. What’s the likelihood that someone will run an AI review and find bugs in other COTS software, internal apps, or even those no-code/lo-code systems people have been deployed? That’s not even mentioning the vibe-coded prototypes that are suddenly important enough to put into production.

The other interesting thing was that Robert accepts that LLMs are likely to find more bugs in the future. How will they find time to work on them? After all, from the article, fixes “still need to be reviewed and committed by humans.”

Maybe the best part of the last paragraph. He says LLMs are going to require every developer to raise their game. Every feature is going to be scrutinized by AI. That’s a challenge and an opportunity, but the key is that developers need to get better. AI can help you and write code at amazing speeds, but it doesn’t think.

We need sharp developers that think in order to cope with AI.

Steve Jones