The article on Postgres 19 cuts off early, so I have the setup and not the full diagnosis. The setup is enough. For ten years the release landed between mid-September and mid-October. This year it’s drifting into November, three large features (FOR PORTION OF, SQL property graph queries, partition merge/split) were pulled between late August and mid-September, and the explanation is one sentence: “LLMs happened.”

What I like is that nobody is blaming the models for writing bad code. The models are reading old code and finding what was already in it. A “large, complex, and old” codebase, in the article’s own words, had a backlog of defects that nobody had the hours to hunt down, and now someone does. The bugs didn’t arrive in August. The visibility did.

That’s a funny kind of regression. The software got no worse, but the project looks worse, because the schedule is the only place where the hidden risk can show up. A delay is the cost of finding out. I’d take the late release over the on-time one that ships the same bugs unseen.

It’s also the friendly twin of a story from earlier this month, where Altman said he sympathizes with mathematicians drowning in AI-generated results, and QGIS and r/opensource decided to ban the stuff at the door. Same flood, different sign. Maintainers can shut out a flood of contributions. A flood of correct findings they can’t, because ignoring a real bug is a decision too.

I wonder how many other old, quiet projects are about to discover their release dates were assuming a level of looking that was never actually happening.

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