“The short answer is that LLMs happened.”
Postgres has shipped a major release every fall for a decade. This year three big features got reverted in beta and the release slipped into November. Haas, a core committer, says LLMs found so many more bugs that back-patched commits to the stable branch jumped 74 percent. The machines can draft fixes too, but a human still has to review and commit every one. That is the part the productivity hype skips. AI did not shrink the work. It moved the bottleneck to the handful of people who can actually say yes.