PostgreSQL 18 had its first release candidate on September 4, 2025, and went GA three weeks later. As I write this, on September 14, 2026, PostgreSQL 19 has no release candidate date. It has a fourth beta scheduled for September 24, a commit freeze for that beta on September 19, and a stated goal of GA “by the end of October.” In the last three weeks it has lost two of the features that headlined every “what’s new in 19” post written since June, including mine. On August 31, Bruce Momjian wrote on -hackers that “it feels we are in an unprecedented situation here.” A week later, Joshua Drake proposed moving the release to spring 2027. Nobody took him up on it. Nobody laughed, either.
This is not a “PostgreSQL is falling apart” post. The project reverts things late every year; the PostgreSQL 11 cycle had a scariest-patch tournament of its own, and WAIT FOR took a decade and three reverts to land. But 19 is different in degree.
Sounds like a “No True Scotsman” argument: If it does not improve/accelerate development, it surely “was not used correctly”?
What does it mean “to use AI correctly”? Is there anything that AI tools guarantee?
How come all these different, very experienced developers did not archieve to add reliably working features?
Could it be that AI tools do not even can maintain basic properties of complex code, like maintaining invariants?
Could it be that people are held responsible for the code and peer reviewed or rejected instead of jamming any old slop in?
I would also like to remind you that systemd , which is part of most mainstream distros like arch, shoved through the most controversial check-in just with a “YOLO LOL” and didn’t need any AI slop to make itself even worse.
Read the article - it was main developers which submitted a number of features because they did not work.
Not on-topic here. Also, this is digging on previous conflict and could be trolling.
Why derail the discussion?