According to Haas, over the past decade PostgreSQL major releases have shipped on a very predictable schedule: no earlier than mid-September and no later than mid-October. This year is different. PostgreSQL 19 most likely won’t ship until November, and the project may even decide to push it back further.
His short explanation is that “LLMs happened,” meaning the large language models behind today’s AI tools. All software has bugs, and PostgreSQL’s code base is large, complex and decades old. What changed is that those bugs have become far easier to find. Fixing them has also gotten easier, just not by as much.
Haas backs this up with the number of changes recorded in the code between April 8 and September 25 of each year:
- In the release being prepared: 724 changes went into the PostgreSQL 18 branch in 2025, and 1,169 into the PostgreSQL 19 branch in 2026. That is a jump of more than 60%.
- In the release already in use: 248 changes went into the PostgreSQL 17 branch in 2025, and 433 into the PostgreSQL 18 branch in 2026. That is a jump of more than 74% in a single year.
Why? Haas says a huge number of people online are now reporting PostgreSQL bugs they found with AI, and the team has been very busy fixing them. Time that would have gone into reviewing the new release went into security issues and other bugs in older versions instead.
One detail every owner should notice: AI can draft fixes, but those fixes aren’t always correct or up to the project’s standards. People still have to review and apply them. Haas himself says the delay is not especially worrying, because it comes from the project’s concern for quality.