Eisentraut: The reverts will continue until morale improves

PostgreSQL coreteam member Peter Eisentraut has written a blogpost reflecting on the "unusually high number of features" that havebeen taken out of the upcoming PostgreSQL19 release since the beta periodbegan.

Some of the reverted features had significant architectural defects thatwould have been hard to fix quickly and during beta. But there was also a longtail of relatively harmless issues involving various edge cases. In past times,many of these would not have surfaced until much later and we would have fixedthem bit by bit over the subsequent five years. But with LLM-assisted codereview, these kinds of things can get found much faster, and then you're staringat a list of like forty defect reports. And even if each of them requires only athree-line fix on average, there is a fixed overhead to dealing with each ofthese, and then you run out of time. Most if not all of the affected revertedfeatures were written a long time ago when LLM-assisted code review was not asuseful as it is now, meaning that the effective quality bar has been raisedafter the time the feature was written and committed. Unless the capabilities ofLLM-assisted code review keep improving at the current rate, this situationshould sort itself out for future development cycles.

A corollary of that is that, at least for the most part, as far as I cantell, this situation is not due to "vibe coding". This code was written wellbefore that was a possibility.

LWN covered the unusuallylarge number of bug fixes required for PostgreSQL19 features inSeptember.