> given that we have forty years of bugs that humans were unable to find but LLMs are quite capable of discovering, how are we ever going to catch up, and how will PostgreSQL continue to innovate?

I mean, maybe just innovate less? "Innovation" is one of those words that makes me queasy nowadays. It's been true for decades that a good deal of what's touted as "innovation" is just stuff that is not actually as important as fixing what's already there. Most software releases new versions far too often for far too little reason. So overall it's good to see Postgres slowing down rather than just barreling ahead with a new release.

Is no one entertaining the possibility that some contributions were lower quality due to AI? I'm surprised to have only seen arguments that it's review.

I'm not very positive on the social, technical, or intellectual impact of AI on software development. Actually, that's understating it. I think AI is basically cancer for the mind. That said, this framing gave me pause:

> The long-term picture is less clear and in some ways more troubling: given that we have forty years of bugs that humans were unable to find but LLMs are quite capable of discovering, how are we ever going to catch up, and how will PostgreSQL continue to innovate? Right now, I’m not sure. What I do know is that I, and many others, are working really hard to figure it out.

Two thoughts:

1. If the signal quality is high--the bug reports are generally valid, the submitted fixes are generally viable (if needing some attention)--then this all seems great. Pause innovation for a while, you can afford it. Focus on burning down the bug count, and resume feature development when things are more stable.

2. If the signal quality isn't good, or is sufficiently mixed that a lot of time is being wasted on low quality contributions... that's more complex. I don't know what to do about that. Maybe stop accepting contributions from unknown contributors? No idea.

From the post I'm not sure whether they're experiencing a (1) or a (2). If it's a (1) that's really interesting, and gives me some glimmer of hope for the future.

[edit] this piece of shit website won't let me reply "you're posting too fast.." so I'll respond to the two replies here (gondalez and sverhagen had basically the same point):

Yes that's a very good point. Not every valid bugfix is equivalently urgent. That's another critical dimension of quality--not burdening maintainers with pedantic bugs. This kind of contextual nuance is, coincidentally, something AI is absolutely awful at.

Now, riddle me this. Does this mean productivity is up or down for the Postgres team?

So it seems there as a certain level of safety in obscurity that was acceptable / fine which has been lost and therefore the focus is shifting towards churning through the slop.

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> The short answer is that LLMs happened. All software contains bugs, and PostgreSQL’s code base is large, complex, and old. Our git history – converted from CVS – now reaches back more than 30 years, and the first code was written a decade before that. There’s a huge amount of code, and that code contains a huge number of bugs. That’s always been true, and it hasn’t stopped PostgreSQL from being popular or successful. What’s different now is that it’s become vastly easier to find those bugs. Fixing them has also gotten easier, but not to the same degree.

LLMs are a gimmick, btw. This is an Anthropic marketing stunt, how much did they pay you? /s