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.

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sverhagen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Signal quality... what is that even? The bugs may be valid, but they may also be obscure, irrelevant, low priority. A sibling thread mentioned that they had found CVE-level bugs in Postgres, and those require attention in some version of "immediately". But beyond that... not every bug needs fixing; that's a trap.

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tonyhart7 2 hours ago | parent [-]

"But beyond that... not every bug needs fixing; that's a trap"

this doesn't seem good attitude for critical software like database

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sverhagen an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Not every part of a critical piece system is itself critical.

Seatback entertainment in aircraft are not critical. Aircraft are.

In Postgres, there are plenty low-priority, low-impact bugs. #16265, for instance, reports that the capitalization of a relation in an error message is confusing. The report got mostly ignored. And that seems not a great loss.

Dare I say, solving every bug does not make economic sense.

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alexpadula 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do tend to agree with this ( i write database internals and engines for a living _). Letting software accumulate even little bugs is not a good look. Yes prioritize but definitely don't leave the smaller things, they will just pile up and make next work even harder.

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tibbar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Old bugs are sometimes undesirable to fix because other systems/users have come to rely on their behavior.

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alexpadula 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

That's a weird take. Do you have an example tibbar?

	▲	tibbar 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure. This one already came up. [0]. In general, for a system like Postgres, many bugs affect only "extreme edge case" scenarios, but fixing them might create severe performance issues or require changing or removing other important features. So it's better to not fix them. [0] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/c22286ad6268347c6...

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gondalez 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Seems like a lot of these bugs have not affected end-users or tripped up maintainers. They could be trade-offs that helped get other features over the line even?

In which case maybe leaving them alone is practical?

I love fixing bugs, but your post triggered this thought so I thought I'd share.