Postgres 19: Are we reverting patches because of bugs found by AI?
Postgres 19 has experienced a one-month release delay due to the reversion of several major features during the development cycle. While recent blog posts attribute these reverts to AI tools uncovering complex bugs, the article argues that this narrative is inaccurate and misidentifies the root causes. The author contends that the reverts were primarily driven by human reviews and the accumulation of post-commit issues rather than AI-generated findings.
- ▪Postgres 19 is expected to be released approximately one month later than originally planned due to recent feature reverts.
- ▪The author disputes the claim that AI tools were the primary cause of the reverts, stating that human reviews and general risk mitigation were the main factors.
- ▪Specific reverts, such as the UPDATE/DELETE FOR PORTION OF feature, were triggered by human-identified concurrency issues and design concerns.
- ▪PostgreSQL currently lacks an official AI contribution policy, although one is expected to be implemented soon.
- ▪The August 2026 patch for Postgres 18 addressed 28 CVEs, a significant increase from the usual average of a couple per release.
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| Original publisher | Tomas Vondra |
| Canonical URL | https://vondra.me/posts/are-we-reverting-patches-because-of-bugs-found-by-ai/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:40:03 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-01T12:47:31.899Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-01T12:47:31.899Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 667cIf4iBq7y · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Over the past month, several major features got reverted from Postgres 19. At this point, even if everything else goes perfectly, Postgres 19 will be released about a month later than originally planned. A couple recent blog posts seem to suggest the reverts happened due to AI finding complex bugs in those patches, with fixes way too invasive this late in the development cycle. I don’t think that narrative matches reality, and I think it matters to correct that.For example, a recent blog post by Elizabeth Christensen says:The AI factorAI has to be part of the story for why we’re in this situation. Several folks are using AI tools to find bugs and create valid reproducible test cases.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tomas Vondra.