PostgreSQL core team member reflects on high number of feature reverts in upcoming release
PostgreSQL core team member discusses high number of feature reverts in upcoming 19 release due to LLM-assisted code review.
Intelligence analysis by Qwen 2.5 (3B)
PostgreSQL core team member Peter Eisentraut reflects on the unusually high number of features being reverted in the upcoming 19 release, attributing it to LLM-assisted code review and the need to fix architectural defects quickly.
Peter Eisentraut, a member of the PostgreSQL team, wrote a blog post about how they had to take out many features from the upcoming 19 release because they found some had big problems. They think it's because they use smart computer programs to look at the code, and these programs found lots of little problems that needed fixing quickly.
Analysis
Architectural Defects and Edge Cases
Peter Eisentraut notes that some of the reverted features had significant architectural defects that would have been hard to fix quickly and during beta. However, there was also a long tail of relatively harmless issues involving various edge cases.
LLM-Assisted Code Review and Fixing Defects
With LLM-assisted code review, these kinds of things can get found much faster, and then you're staring at a list of like forty defect reports. And even if each of them requires only a three-line fix on average, there is a fixed overhead to dealing with each of these, and then you run out of time.
Quality Bar and Future Development
Unless the capabilities of LLM-assisted code review keep improving at the current rate, this situation should sort itself out for future development cycles. This situation is not due to 'vibe coding', as the code was written well before that was a possibility.
Key points
- PostgreSQL core team member discusses high number of feature reverts in upcoming 19 release
- Attributed to LLM-assisted code review and the need to fix architectural defects quickly
- Unless LLM-assisted code review capabilities improve, the situation should sort itself out for future development cycles
- The issue is not due to 'vibe coding', as the code was written before this technology was available
As LLM-assisted code review improves, the number of feature reverts should decrease, and the quality of the code should improve.
If LLM-assisted code review does not improve, the number of feature reverts will continue to be a problem for the PostgreSQL team.