Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929

by justdotJS • 2 months ago

553 418 2 months ago

github.com

magarnicle• 2 months ago

Aww, but I have such big plans for it!

rsyring• 2 months ago

26k code changes in 2 months..... rsync was 67k LOC as of 236417c (latest not obviously vibecoded commit it seems?).[1]

Wow.

1: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen...

scared_together2• 2 months ago

When I look at the commits themselves, most of the ones generated by Claude are testsuite changes, or at least labelled as such.

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/

shimman2• 2 months ago

Is that suppose to make this better? IME the most valuable tests are those that test specific regressions. It's the scaffolding we build for ourselves to enable feature development. Remove that scaffolding and you get accidents. Pray to your god of choice these accidents don't cause harm or loss of life.

It should really be considered negligence at this point. Some of this software is extremely valuable, it's how we flourish as humans. Purposely fucking with that should bear some real world consequence. We do the same in every other industry, software is just as important too.

vips7L2• 2 months ago

Aren’t LLMs notorious for just making tests pass and not actually testing functionality?

layer82• 2 months ago

The correctness of tests is as important as the correctness of the main code. Changing test code isn’t somehow less critical than changing the main code.

Lerc5• 2 months ago

Well to look at the last of that list. It added 134 - 3 lines to the project.

Of which, the actual change was

    -        __m256i mul_one;
    -            mul_one = _mm256_abs_epi8(_mm256_cmpeq_epi16(mul_one,mul_one)); // set all vector elements to 1
    +        __m256i mul_one = _mm256_set1_epi8(1);

and the rest was testing that fix.

krackers• 2 months ago

Hm good timing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334854 (OpenRsync)

em-bee• 2 months ago

i suspect that post was made in reaction to the first AI/rsync post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334021 , as i believe was this post too.

exe34• 2 months ago

is this considered safe? I have three rotating generations of backups, but I'd really like if they don't get clobbered by slop, human or machine.

theonemind• 2 months ago

I find the way that issue was opened incredible obnoxious, but it is baffling that the maintainers seem to have let AI loose on rsync. Like, why? Why try comparatively experimental crap when your fortune and reputation is made and you're the leader of a niche and immune to market pressure and the people love the thing and it does exactly what it's supposed to and works well?

It's like the Matrix, with the little rant about the primitive human minds not being able to accept paradise. You wrote the perfect tool, you won, almost undisplaceable in a niche, reliable, a metaphorical household name. It makes no sense to anyone to gamble or mess with that, it's just mind boggling.

And that's still a damn obnoxious thing to do in the formal issue tracker. Bad attitude, bad faith.

roenxi• 2 months ago

Are you basing this opinion on the issue or actual evidence? Because this github link, although interesting, is almost completely context free on what the drama is beyond "Claude". The rsync maintainers could be anywhere on the spectrum from the perfect and responsible maintainer to incompetent children and we couldn't really tell.

xiphias2• 2 months ago

The problem is the we couldn’t really tell part. Changes made to mature finished projects should be minimal and readable and understandable by humans.

Also rsync is handling copying binary data, it’s a project that’s super sensitive to hardware faults for example, which means it’s not just enough for the tests to pass.

bulbar• 2 months ago

To me it seems people had actual problems with newer versions. Additionally, a significant portion of the code changed within a very short time frame.

Doesn't matter if they did it by hand or with AI.

nottorp3• 2 months ago

is almost completely context free on what the drama is beyond "Claude"

As soon as it happened their rsync based backup system that was working before started to fail. It says right there.

kzrdude• 2 months ago

We could tell, if someone did independent work of reviewing a sample of the contributions and recent changes (and published in a blog post for example).

vips7L2• 2 months ago

Like, why?

Because everyone, including this forum, is addicted to the instant gratification of LLMs. It’s pure hubris of thinking you can scan the output and it does what you think it does.

teaearlgraycold2• 2 months ago

TBH I don't really feel the same most of the time. I give the LLM little chunks to do. I read the code. I think. I plan. I write a bit of code. I have the LLM crunch out some bullshit task like setting up an annoying C repo. There aren't that many moments in building with LLMs where things line up so the AI can just absolutely nail some code and save me a ton of time.

pmarreck5• 2 months ago

You know what nearly-mindless, time-consuming task it can probably do better than anyone and free you up to keep on coding?

Deploying and watching CI and looping until it passes.

rakel_rakel• 2 months ago

I agree about letting AI loose on rsync is baffling, and also that how the issue was filed was incredible obnoxious. A thought crossed my mind though, with the risk of going slightly off topic. Disregarding the fact that mature software like Rsync does not need this kind of movement in changed LOC. Also assuming the maintainers best intentions with how they manage the project:

Since this is happening in open source, what do you think about the state of the quality of closed source software? AI usage (input as a success metric) is part of what you're being evaluated on as an employee, and people are panicking at the threat of mass layoffs due to AI.

Yikes!

tasuki• 2 months ago

when your fortune and reputation is made and you're the leader of a niche

Huh? "Fortune"? You mean the slog of maintaining a popular open source project half the world relies on without compensation?

dannersy• 2 months ago

A couple years back, I think I would have bent over backwards to defend the maintainers. It is a gruelling and thankless effort to maintain any open source project, let alone one as established as rsync. I guess I just don't see AI being a net positive anywhere, and I have to see this backlash to using gen AI as a good course correction from the general populous.

There are other posts talking about the instant gratification of LLM use and the more I have to interact with people using the tools, I think this may truly be the problem. Our biology can't handle it. I see otherwise very smart people do really really stupid things because the slot machine told them, but it has even trained them to be helpless when the slot machine fails them.

I'm being seen as a Luddite, blind to the advancement, and then I see colleagues writing benchmarks that make no sense but have beautiful graphs made with AI. Then I basically have to choose to smile at them and pretend it's good work or scold them for not seeing that the bench is testing an interval baked in as a constant so it's moot. Both options are treating them like they are 7 years old, not intelligent colleagues.

rf152• 2 months ago

instant gratification

I'm with you. I don't understand why it affects some people more than others. To me, using AI triggered my sense for drugs and addiction after a while: when your first association for an engineering product is "it feels _great_!" then run, it's just cocaine with extra components.

A tool should not make you feel good, just accomplish the task.

timmytokyo• 2 months ago

That's exactly what it is. It's gambling. Like pulling the arm of a slot machine.

[0] https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116657411750038515

cyphar• 2 months ago

I'm being seen as a Luddite, blind to the advancement

Note that the Luddite movement was actually not opposed to the technology itself, but how it would negatively impact workers' rights and textile quality[1]. Many Luddites were actually highly-skilled machine operators.

Any of that sound familiar?

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

pmarreck5• 2 months ago

I guess I just don't see AI being a net positive anywhere

well, at least you're being honest about your non-empirical biases...

JodieBenitez• 2 months ago

the maintainers seem to have let AI loose on rsync

is it an assumption ?

mort963• 2 months ago

No: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/

ejpir2• 2 months ago

you know what is baffling? you commenting about letting loose AI on rsync, where you, and me included, have absolutely zero insight in how he used Claude.

What https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen... shows is that it no longer works on older Darwin and Linux < 5.6, which has been deprecated in 2020. Plus some other bugs as well.

You cannot expect maintainers to support old systems and know the impact their changes have. Whether its done by AI or hand.

impure• 2 months ago

Oh no, not Rsync. I guess that's one good thing about MacOS shipping with an ancient version of rsync. Oh, wait, they ship openrsync now, but the command is still called rsync.

jochem9• 2 months ago

This is the third HN post I read on this topic. Everytime the same tweet (or whatever it's called for mastodon/bluesky/etc). Did anyone actually debug the issue?

Was it caused by poorly generated code, or was it caused a genuine (security) fix that accidentally caused it (potentially even in a way a human would to)?

cwillu• 2 months ago

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen... has a partial list

Lerc5• 2 months ago

That is a list of problems, not causes, which is what was being asked for.

It's possible it's some LLM randomness that caused bugs. That would suggest that some AI hygiene is in order.

If it is because of behaviour changes necessary to fix security issues, then the regressions might be from things that relied on unsafe features.

Do we know of actual specific causes yet?

JdeBP• 2 months ago

It's called a post, the same as you used for Hacker News.

And yes, I debugged one of the issues. I made the second comment in one of them. Markus Mayer did some debugging, too.

Then I had to deal with something completely unrelated to computers for the rest of that day and several days thereafter, and came back to this.

The problem with compiling code that used new kernel features was a bit poorly done. Anyone with any experience knows that a simple #if defined(__linux__) , which is a platform test, does not cut it for feature testing. M. Mayer went with an autotools test, which is what I'd have done too.

The problem with the on-the-wire protocol is a tricky one, and caused by suddenly being conservative in what rsync accepts apparently without much testing of what out-of-range stuff in-the-wild rsync sends.

z3t42• 2 months ago

Few things can trigger me more then finding a bug/regression and when tracking it down the commit reads like "modernizing the code", replacing all var with let, etc.

ornornor3• 2 months ago

Uhhh why? Aren’t these worthy goals? I’ve worked on software where the motto was “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and they paid me quite a bit of money to update from distributions, runtimes, and libraries that were EOL for 5–10 years already. I’d argue that keeping up loosely with modern practices of much easier than running outdated everything and suffer the consequences (breaches, painful updates)

z3t42• 2 months ago

What hurts the most is that most ppl disagree with me. It's like people telling you they will paint your house for free, even though the color of your house is perfectly fine, you agree to paint it in another color. Then you come home to find that they have bored a bunch of holes in the facade and tells you it's the new industry standard, when the winter comes you will have to plug these holes with special plugs, and you wake up next morning and it's -10 C outside. Your house is now pink, you are cold, and nothing has improved. Next week another team comes by and offers to repaint your house for free... They say orange is the new pink.

vsgherzi• 2 months ago

I also hate the ai slop but on the flip slide this maintainer has been asking for help for years and dosent receive much in the discord. I also want quality code but don’t jump to demonize a volunteer especially when not many have jumped in to help

Hendrikto4• 2 months ago

Did he ask for help in churning all the code for no reason? Rsync was complete software. It does not need features, it needs stability and merely maintenance.

If the author used AI for small, well-reviewed maintenance changes, that would be okay. But instead he is making large and sweeping changes that are entirely uncalled for and cause breakage.

If the maintainer is overworked, that is even more reason not to do this.

brabel• 2 months ago

What the hell why are you thinking you decide anything?? The man has his project and can do whatever he wants with it. Read the license.

TheDong• 2 months ago

Do you have any links to commits or changes that you think are "uncalled for"? Like, you say "he is making large and sweeping changes that are entirely uncalled for and cause breakage", so surely you have some examples?

As far as I can tell, most of the AI-assisted changes were security fixes and test-suite related, and I'm sure you can agree that both of those are normal maintenance.

throwaway73566• 2 months ago

Rsync was complete software.

It was (and is) not: rsync has over 300 open issues with bugs and feature requests.

Sacho6• 2 months ago

If Rsync is complete software, why aren't you pinning the version and avoiding any problems with updates?

Perhaps there's people that don't consider it complete software; they can bear the burden of the new releases while you stay on the old and complete one. This has been normal software release and use practice for decades. Whole Linux distributions are built around different philosophies on software releases.

And yet you're making an argument as if this is something novel...

himata4113• 2 months ago

previous convo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334021, has my comment so won't repeat myself.

nickdothutton• 2 months ago

Torture testing required before acceptance of vibed/AI submissions?

koehler• 2 months ago

I truly don't get it

You have a rock solid piece of software used by an infinite amount of people and other services. It works fine, does it's job and just have some time to time updates due to minor bug fixes.

Why do we need AI here?

And more over, why people is saying "fork it and use the previous version". It should be actually all the way around, create a parallel fork younamethetool-ai and keep the OG untouched.

What I have to do now, keep a fork of my entire system's toolkit?

nottorp3• 2 months ago

Why is there a need of AI in here?

For the same reason as some people would rewrite it in Rust.

mike_hock• 2 months ago

No, that's usually to decrease the number of bugs and vulnerabilities.

baliex• 2 months ago

I 100% agree with the "please don't fuck up this stable & reliable workhorse" sentiment.

I haven't read this in detail but "Six CVEs are fixed in this release. All six are assigned by VulnCheck as CNA. Affected versions are 3.4.2 and earlier in every case." seems like a pretty solid answer to the "why".

https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.4.3

mattbee• 2 months ago

But there's been security fixes in most releases of rsync!

Even then, why would a security fix be some kind of strike against AI? We've all seen LLMs being used to tease out the most serious and obscure bugs in C codebases. I'd expect to see a lot of security fixes for an ancient, well-used codebase when an LLM analyses it.

Where is the slop commit here? And why is that commit evidence that tridge has lost his mind to the machine? https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/

Quarrel2• 2 months ago

wtf is this comment section?

The author of these commits were tridge & claude.

What does tridge have to do to convince the open source community that he might be a legit programmer & have a clue?

Samba? Whats that? Rsync? Never heard of it. Tivo? No clue (maybe more Australian context here than others, but still).

Even the comments on the github issue, are totally devoid of the context that this is a very senior open source contributer who has maintained this project since he came up with the diff algorithm during his Phd, started the project and now chooses to acknowledge that he's using claude.

Is there any evidence that the bug rate on rsync is any worse than it used to be? or just a screenshot from mastadon?

It is just so bizarre to me.

ShinyLeftPad3• 2 months ago

this is a very senior open source contributer who has maintained this project since he came up with the diff algorithm during his Phd

People change. You can be Linus Torvalds for all I care, if one day you wake up and start pushing 9000 line commits created by LLM and with regressions, you're not that person anymore.

oytis• 2 months ago

I'm not sure about tridge personally, but I've regularly seen real competent engineers introduce obvious hallucinations when using coding agents. Review fatigue is real, and you just cannot own the code you didn't write to the same degree as the one you wrote

izacus6• 2 months ago

Is there any evidence that the bug rate on rsync is any worse than it used to be? or just a screenshot from mastadon?

There's plenty of evidence that rsync 3.4.3 has broken a bunch of features like incremental copies, yes.

Which is why your post is a great proof of how AI derangement can make previously great engineers output broken dangerous slop.

otabdeveloper43• 2 months ago

Why do we need AI here?

AI psychosis is a real thing and an actual mental health issue.

rf152• 2 months ago

funny speculative question: psychosis is evidently a gradient. Does AI just highlight latent general psychosis (i.e. in the simplified interpretation of a worldview shaped more by unchecked belief and fantasy than observation) in otherwise largely functional people?

What if the problem is that we train people too much to take things that are being said at face value without questioning/observing them, increasing the psychosis problem?

xnx• 2 months ago

Similar to anti-AI derangement

pibaker2• 2 months ago

The only psychotic behavior I see in the linked issue comes from the anti AI people.

lukaslalinsky5• 2 months ago

That's up to the maintainer to decide, no? If they decide to use AI to write more tests, then they do it. It's not like they owe the public something. If the "public" wants to take the project over and maintain it, they can fork it, but it's a thankless job.

bigstrat20032• 2 months ago

Sure, it's up to the maintainer. But it's also not unreasonable for the users to say "this approach is going to have problems, please reconsider". Obviously, you can take that too far - and the Internet being what it is, we would expect to see that happening a lot of the time. But it's not inherently unreasonable to ask the maintainer to reconsider his approach.

akerl_13• 2 months ago

Why would it be the maintainer’s responsibly to fork their own repo? It wouldn’t even make sense; who would maintain the old repo?

They also don’t need a reason, or owe you their reason, for changing what tools they use to work on their open source projects.

pishpash7• 2 months ago

Autonomous agents are different. Claude should fork the repo because it is a new maintainer trying to take over a project. Doesn't matter if the OG maintainer is under illusions.

helsinkiandrew• 2 months ago

Why do we need AI here?

As several comments in the issue mention, it's up to the developers that contribute to an open source package to decide how they do it. Complaining on an issue tracker (apparently without proof) about AI ruining a piece of software is a form of "Open Source contributor abuse" discussed frequently on Hacker News [1]

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen...

The issue tracker is not a place for you to farm viral social media posts. Either report an actionable bug or fork it yourself. Venting about the developers choices is not productive.

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen...

@II-Paulus-II Stop. You know nothing. You have shipped 0 features by hand. No one has ever depended on your code. You are a finger-wagging "AI wrote this" type in an era where you hide in plain sight coasting on the moral high ground of writing toy projects and scripts from scratch. Can't ship, can't adapt, can't even realize that an issue tracker is not the place for this kind of attitude.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077833

ddosmax5563• 2 months ago

I agree, if I was the maintainer this would be an extremely tiring community feedback.

People coming in "I encountered a bug, I don't know what the bug is but I thought about it for a second and it's obviously your descision to do xyz".

As a maintainer, what are you supposed to do? It's not more useful than a ticket "somethings wrong idk what" which is useless enough to close without further action. But it puts the burden on the maintainer to a) figure out what's wrong based on basically no data whatsoever, then b) if they find it out figure out why then c), and that's the tiring part, review their process and create a defense for their approach, or admit that that thing that random user felt after trying out your software for 10 minutes is right, and that you were what? stupid to even think this would ever work? They never asked for any of this, and they're already doing so much work for free.

If the rsync maintainer reads this: You're doing incredible work and humanity appreciates your obviously incredibly competence in it, and not everyone feels the way these people do.

Moving to agentic workflows is obviously the right step and it already provides enough benefits to do it already. And mistakes are bound to happen (if the issue is even a mistake!) and there will always be people who cannot comprehend the power of agents and who will point the finger saying "I know it from the start! I've worked with these tools for 2 hours already and I can see they don't work! Idk why you think they do!". They're wrong. But mistakes will happen that otherwise wouldn't have - but that's the learning experience.

dnh443• 2 months ago

I feel really bad for the sense of entitlement a lot of open source devs have to deal with. Imagine building something for free as a hobby then having to deal a mob of angry people who have never paid you whenever you do something they don’t like. Surely your first thought would be to tell them to foxtrot oscar somewhere else.

jech• 2 months ago

That's not my experience. Users naturally get frustrated when I break the software that they rely upon, and sometimes they use strong words, but the resulting conversation is almost always friendly and productive. (There are exceptions, of course, but that's life, right?)

Here's a recent sample, paraphrased for brevity:

Them: this is broken.

Me: no, it's not broken.

Them (a few days later): "I think I must not have tried all the combinations", followed with two pages of transcripts.

Me: "I've just checked the code, and you're right [...] I'm extremely sorry I wasted your time."

Them: "Heh, it's all good. I'm am chuffed you're taking the time to give thoughtful responses with me"

Source: https://github.com/jech/galene/issues/309

soerxpso3• 2 months ago

Why do we need any tools at all? Software worked perfectly fine when people were editing code with `ed`, so I'm going to go open timewasting issues complaining about FOSS devs using an IDE.

sarlalian2• 2 months ago

Because all software has bugs, because the system underlying that software changes and you need to keep up, because for some people it’s just missing that one feature or doesn’t work quite right in that one edge case. I’d bet that there are issues in the backlog with people’s complaining that their issue isn’t being addressed quick enough.

Is AI the problem, or that it had a regression? Is the regression actually caused by AI?

relistan4• 2 months ago

Hacker News: “It’s unfair the burden put on maintainers of the core pillars of open source software. Show some respect for the maintainers, and do your best to contribute.”

… little changes …

Also Hacker News: “I have the right to tell you how to manage the project that you created and have maintained for 30+ years, because I feel very self-righteous about AI and code quality!”

marginalia_nu2• 2 months ago

As HN consists of more than two people, it is home to multiple contradictory opinions. Furthermore, both points may be valid. As a user you might want working software, and as an open source maintainer, you aren't beholden to what the users want.

relistan4• 2 months ago

Sure, but you cannot deny the hypocritical swarm behavior, which is the point.

nelsonfigueroa• 2 months ago

Goomba fallacy https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

GalaxyNova• 2 months ago

What's next? Vibe coded coreutils?

akoboldfrying2• 2 months ago

Funny you should say that. The latest Ubuntu reimplemented coreutils in Rust, introducing a bunch of TOCTOU bugs.

TTBOMK the reimplementation was done by humans, but the overall principle still applies I think.

ornornor3• 2 months ago

I think TTBOMK = to the best of my knowledge, for TOUWANFIA (those of us who are not fluent in acronyms)

kjellsbells• 2 months ago

I sure would hate to be a human developer named Claude right now. You wouldnt get credit for anything and every problem would be laid at your feet.

GCUMstlyHarmls• 2 months ago

On the plus side, the CTO, CEO and CFO all know you by name now.

simianwords2• 2 months ago

I get the feeling that the GitHub issue space is used to wage some ideological warfare. It’s interesting to see how all this is panning and out how it would look like in the future. This tech is going absolutely nowhere.

akoboldfrying2• 2 months ago

Nobody whose software you use for free owes you anything. It is so important not to lose sight of this.

If you feel like they do owe you something, that's only because years of habit -- years of using other people's software for free, and having the good fortune of finding it generally to improve in quality over time -- has caused your baseline to drift from the true state of affairs, which is that nobody whose software you use for free owes you anything.

ianbutler• 2 months ago

People here hate hearing this. You're entirely correct though.

tardedmeme2• 2 months ago

Indeed you can step down, but as one of the comments says:

Just because you're giving free soup to the homeless doesn't mean you can piss in it

DonsDiscountGas3• 2 months ago

Okay but if shipping software that has a bug counts as pissing in soup then a lot of people have been doing this for a long time.

christkv2• 2 months ago

Can GitHub add a tag to repositories that says "probably vibe coded" or "ai code detected"

0123456789ABCDE3• 2 months ago

would you argue for an 'unsafe code' tag too, if it's attached to repos with C/C++?

cyclopeanutopia4• 2 months ago

So all the other languages are safe now?

christkv2• 2 months ago

Would have to be on all repositories I think.

poulpy123• 2 months ago

GitHub shows the language used

hsbauauvhabzb• 2 months ago

Why would a proponent of AI with significant interest stigmatise AI like that?

LtWorf9• 2 months ago

We could tell the managers is so that we can avoid luddite software!

Nasrudith• 2 months ago

Requesting an AI code detector is peak cognitive dissonance. "AI automation is bad and I can always tell. That is why I need to have a tool to discriminate its presence so I can exclude it!" Split-brain patients have less post-hoc rationalization.

hugodan• 2 months ago

Just use openrsync instead. And OpenBSD for that matter. There goes the bazar…

kdjkskdndn2• 2 months ago

Dude ssshhhhhhhhhhhh next thing systemd will come for openbsd...

sciolist• 2 months ago

When commenting, please assume good faith (in other commenters and maintainers).

This is the third thread I've read on HN about the subject and I've sadly seen a lot of closeminded or shallow comments on each thread. Adding the above reminder, as I hope HN can engage in more thoughtful discussion.

DonsDiscountGas3• 2 months ago

One should assume good faith at first, or when in doubt, but after a certain point it's just denial.

michaelmrose8• 2 months ago

This entire post doesn't belong here other than as a cautionary tale.

Don't use other people's issue trackers to editorialize to force them to react to what would otherwise be a tweet

They NEVER proved that they experienced a bug with rsync and if they did experience a bug with rsync they certainly didn't prove that it was caused by AI assistance. This useful research would have required real work.

Their language and methodology of communication is abominable. Lest we forget the "crime" of the developer is providing for free something so useful that it became integral the the users workflow for years then potentially shipping a buggy version. People who labor for free for us deserve our thanks not our contempt.

throwaway2027• 2 months ago

AI for me but not for thee.

croes• 2 months ago

Could be generalized to Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software.

Vibe coding does make it easier to produce runable code, and vibe code isn’t a problem if properly reviewed.

Seems like AI just exposed that it doesn’t happened properly.

LtWorf9• 2 months ago

vibe code isn’t a problem if properly reviewed

Ah yes, we couldn't write bug-free software so now instead we take on the much harder challenge of reviewing code instead. That will surely work out.

llbbdd2• 2 months ago

Crazy to watch the death of open source happen in real time like this. Why would anyone share any code to open themselves up for all of these wannabe main characters to pile on them? Given the choice I'd rather have a bunch of slop coded PR contributions to wade through than whatever this entitled nightmare raider thread is.

m132• 2 months ago

Wow.

Rsync has to be one of the worst spaghetti projects I've worked with. It's an incredibly decent tool built around a well-though out algorithm, but its code is an exact opposite of what you'd expect. And it's written in C.

I'm not surprised letting Claude loose on it for roughly 2 months already caused visible breakage. The question is, with it being very obviously a bad idea, can the maintainer still be trusted if he let something like this happen?

eloisant• 2 months ago

Is there any evidence this was broken by AI?

I feel like these day any time users find an issue in software they blame it on "vibe coding". But software had bugs before AI.

reliablereason• 2 months ago

The issue is apparently this commit (someone did a git bisect):

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/859d44fa4f14207...

Which is a fix to the security issue CVE-2026-29518: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-29518

A CVE reported by VulnCheck which is a company that uses AI to find software vulnerabilitys.

I would honestly blame this on bad test coverage.

If you look at most of the commits where Claude is "co-author" you see that 80% of are just adding new tests. Which is exactly what would be needed if low test coverage was the issue.

I have done the exact same thing long before AI was a thing. You are rushed to "FIX" some security issue that someone reported. It is a scenario where you are working in code that you did not write or you wrote it so long ago that you cant remember. You try your best to just fix the security issue but you perturb something else while doing it.

nbaugh13• 2 months ago

This doesn’t even 100% mean that the code was generated using Claude, only really means the commit message was.

Write some code and then ask Claude to diff your changes and write a commit message. Now the internet hates you

alkonaut• 2 months ago

Would be interesting to know what exactly went wrong. How obvious was the mistake? How necessary was the change? What is wrong with the test suite that didn’t capture it?

vinyl7• 2 months ago

What went wrong is using LLM generated code

SideburnsOfDoom• 2 months ago

It seems that the person who opened this issue has a real and relevant point.

But neither the original post nor the majority of the responses are productive, mostly due to the acrimonious language used.

rawoke0836002• 2 months ago

Been thinking of this mental model held by some "oh ai coding is always bad etc etc" (fair we all allowed opinions).

But why are we okey with colleagues making from time to time terrible blunders (hey we all human ). But when ai makes mistakes its a sweeping judgment of "oh ai coding is terrible".

We seen to not include all the amazing code they do right and security bugs they do find..

I feel if it was a human or colleague we be more fair with its failure and balance about his/her achievements also.

Just a thought.ymmv

consp3• 2 months ago

When LLMs make mistakes, it is still the human making the mistake of trusting the LLM. And more often than not "AI" is hailed as costing no effort and being perfect in every way (yes exaggerated), which you can attack when it obviously is going to fail at some point.

sureglymop• 2 months ago

Because AI can't take responsibility. Humans can.

A human can not only learn from their mistakes and blunders but also, until very recently, the social pressure and fear of judgement would push (some) humans to try their best.

Now however, it is less socially acceptable to judge a human for mistakes made with AI coding because we are in a time of experimentation. So the blame has to go towards AI coding. Of course, coding with AI can be acceptable, if the human using the AI is rational and responsible.

But I think the bigger implicit point is actually that perhaps experimentation shouldn't be done on real projects and products as nonchalantly.

matt32102• 2 months ago

AI mistakes are due to pure laziness and incompetence that appears well done. There’s a big difference between that and a genuine mistake from a knowledgeable person.

rawoke0836002• 2 months ago

Lol what ??

matt32102• 2 months ago

When people realize the AI doesn’t work in the long run we can have a mass revert party

afshinmeh• 2 months ago

Genuinely wondering though: is the problem that the patch was vibe coded, or is that no one reviewed the changes?

bakugo9• 2 months ago

"Vibe coding" implies the changes weren't reviewed. That's the most common definition of the term.

Even if the developer himself didn't say that, though, it's safe to assume no AI generated commit beyond a very small size is ever properly reviewed (in the sense that the entire code is actually understood) because doing so would take longer than actually writing the code by hand like a caveman.

thevinter3• 2 months ago

This whole brigading is bizzarre and some people are behaving like irrational animals. I potentially understand the motivations that might bring one to want to "win" this battle but this really isn't it - it just makes you sound like a fanatic.

It takes 5 minutes to search for "regression" on the issue page and go through the 17 results. There are potentially even more on the tracker used prior to github.

I think this behavior is very silly and people are just trying to justify their hate to AI by latching onto every possible thing, seemingly forgetting that before AI people did mistakes as well.

If you have proof that AI involvement in rsync has lead to a significant increase in open issues please show it to me - I'll be happy to change my mind.

consp3• 2 months ago

I think this behavior is very silly and people are just trying to justify their hate to AI by latching onto every possible thing

It's not silly to have issues with something. People act on their issues. Possibly not the issue underlying the commit at hand here but something else, and act on it which makes it something to consider. My guess is people are tired of the "AI is the greatest thing since [cultural reference]" being forced down their throat and grasp at every straw to combat it, which is a sane response in my opinion and should be taken into account.

thevinter3• 2 months ago

It's not silly to have issues with something.

I absolutely understand and agree. As I said, I understand the underlying reason.

The silly part is the brigading - issues should be adressed on their own merits. The specific GH issue, and some of the comments therein, make the whole crowd they're affiliated with look bad. (imho)

throwaway73566• 2 months ago

and grasp at every straw to combat it, which is a sane response

Attacking every open source maintainer who might use AI for the sin of having used AI because one hates AI is just abusive behavior, not "sane response".

What would the "sane response" be for people tired of the "AI is being forced down my throat and I need to combat it by attacking open source maintainers" side? Grasp at every straw to combat such behavior?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 2 months ago

It's not silly to have issues with something.

Note this is not what OP called silly. It's possible to take legitimate issue with something, then act silly about it. People are free to their opinions but not necessarily to (as an extreme example) write their opinions on the wall with their excrement. Regardless of any veracity behind the opinion, some decorum is expected in its expression. (I guess unless one is explicitly doing away with decorum but that's when violence takes its place.)

daishi554• 2 months ago

They’re just picking easy targets to bully. There is undoubtedly AI-written code in the Linux kernel now, but are they out there harassing those maintainers? No. rsync GitHub is easier to brigade.

rrrx32• 2 months ago

My guess is people are tired of the "AI is the greatest thing since [cultural reference]" being forced down their throat and grasp at every straw to combat it, which is a sane response in my opinion and should be taken into account.

Let's engage in some parallelism then

This happens with literally everything in our society. Right now, every single food product seems to be infused with protein. In the past, they've had GMOs removed, MSG removed, been Fiber-infused... the list goes on and on.

We don't see people bullying and threatening grocery store clerks and managers over clear hype-cycle bullshit. Why? Because every rational person knows this is pure nonsense.

This behavior is NOT sane.

As many others have pointed out, this is just a regression that occurred during regular software development. There's nothing remarkable here that makes it AI-specific, other than that the contributions were AI-assisted. Regressions in software happen. You roll back to a stable version and make a bug report. You don't shit your diaper and sling it at the maintainer.

Acting like a giant fucking douche is NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOR.

ls6122• 2 months ago

AI has become a partisan political issue with all of the attendant consequences. At this point you may as well complain about the sun rising in the east :(

culi3• 2 months ago

I'm not sure how partisan it is but it's certainly politicized. Regular people also weren't the ones that politicized it. These AI companies knew the risks they were taking on when they donated to Trump, bought out local city boards, heavily invested in lobbying campaigns, etc. They are betting that the federal government will protect them from the consequences of their meddling by positioning themselves as a geopolitical priority. Claude has already been used to plan and prioritize targets in Iran

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...

As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people. The pairing of Maven and Claude has created a tool that is speeding the pace of the campaign, reducing Iran’s ability to counterstrike and turning weeks-long battle planning into real-time operations, said one of the people. The AI tools also evaluate a strike after it is initiated, the person said.
The Pentagon began to integrate Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into Maven in late 2024, according to public announcements. The system has been used to generate proposed targets, to track logistics and provide summaries of intelligence coming in from the field. The Trump administration has vastly expanded the use of Maven into many other parts of the military, with over 20,000 military personnel using it as of last May.

123ahsg6• 2 months ago

The way it is done with meme pictures is bizarre. The language used is the same that Tridgell knows from the LKML, so that is not the primary concern.

How are maintainers supposed to know that users don't trust AI if no one voices that concern? rsync was very stable. Should people silently move to Openrsync and never say anything?

daishi554• 2 months ago

If you look through that thread, it’s very clearly an online hate mob whipped into a frenzy by someone on mastodon. They should all go back to mastodon and reddit and stop bothering people who actually work on important things.

They’re also all completely disingenuous (“I’ll have to stop using rsync now”) given that 99.99% of software now includes AI-written code, whether it’s known or not.

ejpir2• 2 months ago

yes, you should, you have no say in how people develop their software.

submit a bug report if you like, but keep your opinion away from issue trackers.

sarlalian2• 2 months ago

How are the maintainers supposed to know that the users don’t trust VS Code if no one voices their concerns like a rabid mob? Seriously why should the maintainer care what users think about how they produce code?

Bugs happen, regressions happen regardless of whether it’s human or AI written. The only valid criticism is that he’s moving too fast for quality code review by others. That said, I bet if you search through the issues you’ll find multiple places where users have complained about their bug staying open for too long without being addressed.

fao_• 2 months ago

I think people are very justifiably angry that a very stable, well trusted tool, has started to immediately go downhill. The Linux Mint Timeshift tool has an issue open documenting a number of regressions that are currently open on the rsync issues page, that were only introduced post-vibecoding (https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift/issues/548), one of those links goes to a larger aggregate of bugs reported downstream (https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/issues/60825). I think it is incredibly rational and sane, given the reputation of vibecoded software as-such (where every professional who loves it is saying "you have to hold it in this very specific way so it doesn't cause bugs, and also you should probably only use it for version 0s so you can map out the domain"), for people to be angry that their load-bearing industry standard backup tool that is very, very well respected is suddenly pulling the rug out from under them because the maintainer wants to "add more features" and is doing it in what is clearly an unsafe way. Also from the timeshift thread:

not sure if this is just me, but after updating rsync, my cpu usage got so bad during my daily backups that i had to stop timeshift from running forever

Or, phrased differently - People are frustrated and annoyed that the tool they trusted with their backups and data are seeing a huge number of regressions and new bugs that break their entire backup infrastructure, all because the main dev is vibecoding that software. Vibecoding experts like Simon Wilson explicitly state that vibecoding is 'viable' in the sense of "only if you hold the tool in a specific way", and this person is either not doing that, or that statement is untruthful. If you actually read the thread in question and just skim over the argument two people are having, there are multiple reports from users in industrial and government settings that now have to go through whole processes to update this software, simply because the software has become immediately untrustworthy in a way that directly harms users and defeats the entire point of the software in question.

I think I would also be mad if I relied on this software for my 500gb+ backups, and I wonder how many more issues have been introduced that we simply won't learn about until a company has a $10 million dollar data loss because they were not testing their backups consistently.

pishpash7• 2 months ago

Exactly this. The most salient comment basically said that AI use has increased the cadence of commits beyond reliable testing capacity for what was a stable product in equilibrium. It isn't an issue specific complaint so it wouldn't make sense to only flag one specific issue. In fact you'd fall behind trying to chase the AI moving head. This has everything to do with AI, and isn't a normal issue reporting situation. The other camp seems highly defensive, which reeks of indefensibility.

Kim_Bruning2• 2 months ago

I think people are very justifiably angry

That may or may not be true, people are justifiably (or not justifiably) angry about a lot of things all the time.

But this was very obviously a brigading attempt. It's a form of online bullying. If it had been about whether the maintainer liked striped socks, nothing else about this would have changed.

Later on the brigade can claim "oh we had a justifiable grievance" to sooth their souls, but what actually happened is what actually happened.

It's all a bit silly and childish.

(To be sure: the balance of fao_'s statement is well reasoned. It's the brigade who are being childish, and I don't think they should be rewarded for that. )

graemep2• 2 months ago

The Linux Mint Timeshift tool has an issue open documenting a number of regressions that are currently open on the rsync issues page, that were only introduced post-vibecoding (https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift/issues/548)

There are four actual regressions there. The commits that introduced two of them have been identified, and neither neither of those mentions Claude (or another LLM).

If you look at the actual commits that credit Claude, they are not huge commits (many are a few lines), most are tests and config. This is not vibe-coding.

there are multiple reports from users in industrial and government settings that now have to go through whole processes to update this software

If people are handling such critical data with it they will be testing upgrades before deploying to production right?

I wonder how many more issues have been introduced that we simply won't learn about until a company has a $10 million dollar data loss because they were not testing their backups consistently.

If a backup failure would cause a $10mn loss then its grossly irresponsible to not test your backups.

wuschel• 2 months ago

Would you know anything about stable forks for rsync that are not affected by performance quality degradations?

Sacho6• 2 months ago

The Linux Mint Timeshift tool has an issue open documenting a number of regressions that are currently open on the rsync issues page, that were only introduced post-vibecoding

Hi fao, the issue you linked starts with:

Rsync 3.4.3 and newer is AI slop, and currently has several open security vulnerabilities and other critical bugs (including some link-related ones) caused by said AI slop:

It then proceeds to link to multiple functional regressions caused by (theoretically) fixes to security vulnerabilities.

This took me about 10 mins to review. It seems that the person who created the issue did not bother to spend 10 minutes to check his own work. Is this "vibe reporting"? What should we say about the irony of employing "human slop" to trash "AI slop"?

Further ironically, the "aggregate of bugs" in void-linux included an issue that was not even about rsync. More "human slop" that you are happy with?

potsandpans• 2 months ago

Averse behavioral ai syndrome

thefz• 2 months ago

seemingly forgetting that before AI people did mistakes as well.

It's just that they now have the chance to do them 1000% faster and not even realize

ray_v• 2 months ago

I haven't decided where I land on this idea of pointing llms at mature, human-crafted software projects (again, assuming they are moderately mature projects).

It's clearly a win for 1-man projects and greenfield projects, but maybe not for what's described above ...__yet__.

antirez2• 2 months ago

A few years ago, the probability of such shit reaching the Hacker News home page was near zero, because regardless of the merits, here was not full of normies that could not understand when a behavior is unacceptable (I'm referring to the violence of the language of the issue). And now, here we are, surrounded by people that can't tell the most obvious things.

weiliddat• 2 months ago

Maybe I'm getting too skeptical. I have a feeling increasingly many of the comments on HN and the GitHub issue are just bots ragebaiting other people (incl. the maintainer)...

cafebabbe• 2 months ago

Love that your comment is ambiguous enough to apply to both sides here :)

antirez2• 2 months ago

Nope my comment is against the folks that are criticizing rsync author. Editing the comment to make it more clear, thanks.

latexr4• 2 months ago

I think you’re looking at it through rose-coloured glasses. Controversial issues like this which fall outside regular bug reporting have always been submitted and became popular on HN. And developers are capable of such language, we have a reputation for being rude and even used to have a poster boy for it. Blaming this on “normies” (itself typically a dismissive word) is ignoring the problem has always been there and our responsibility in it.

bakugo9• 2 months ago

Similarly, a few years ago, I would've never expected "my magic code generation machine is doing all my work for me now, I don't even bother looking at what it does anymore!" to reach the Hacker News home page on a regular basis, either, yet here we are.

Irrational actions lead to irrational reactions.

pacifika3• 2 months ago

That’s not how LLMs are used by experienced engineers.

roxolotl• 2 months ago

Describing the issue as “violent” is wild. Reading through a bit, it’s massive, it’s clear no one involved has the moral high ground here. The polite response is to close the issue if you believe it’s genuinely off topic.

Still not quite sure what you mean by obvious because to me “Stop. You know nothing. You have shipped 0 features by hand. No one has ever depended on your code.” Is much more violent than “please do not vibe fuckup this software”.

craigmart• 2 months ago

The "Stop. You know nothing." comment was apparently a reference to this tweet. https://x.com/CodyRhodes/status/980680154098757632

Embarassing nonetheless

themgt• 2 months ago

Opening an issue consisting only of some twitter clone screenshot with some "literally who" who found a bug called "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software" ain't it. That's not a way to tell a maintainer that you disagree with the direction they're taking. This issue is entirely useless. A "fucked up vibe coded" bug report would have been better.

This nailed it. None of the bug reports even attempt to document the claimed "--compare-dest=" regression. I did ctrl-f and I didn't even see anyone mention "compare-dest" again? The people posting worthless AI rage comments could have asked Opus 4.8 to spin up rysnc 3.4.3 vs. 3.4.1, thoroughly document the regression and git bisect the commit that broke it and filed a 1000x more professional and useful bug report.

If you want society to value your human work more than AI work, try to avoid acting like a uniquely human bozo.

eudamoniac• 2 months ago

They're not mad about the bug, they're mad about the cause of the bug. This is like city council starts flinging stones with a trebuchet into streets, and you're expected to calmly file pothole reports instead of complaining about the trebuchet.

mhitza• 2 months ago

The way Code of Conducts where being pushed on some open source projects in the past, there was enough vitriol and cross-platform harassment.

This one is "tamer", a bit, because the hate goes towards the AI usage, not the person.

ofjcihen2• 2 months ago

You could also say that about using dismissive language like “normies”.

Regarding it reaching the front page: is it possible that’s because others feel the same way about a software they might use daily for important work?

Trite as the gh issue is and surely this is thankless work, the bottom line and reality is that rsync is a cornerstone for a lot of sensitive pipelines.

stevenally• 2 months ago

"Trite as the gh issue is and surely this is thankless work, the bottom line and reality is that rsync is a cornerstone for a lot of sensitive pipelines".

Maybe don't piss off the maintainer then?

moi2388• 2 months ago

There is no violence in the language. Violence is intentional use of physical force.

RustyRussell• 2 months ago

I'm shocked that people are jumping on one of the most productive and powerful OSS maintainers in existence.

The actual Claude "churn" is mainly test suite enhancement.

nuclearpidgeon• 2 months ago

One of the most reliable OSS sync/backup tools on the planet for 2+ decades broke under people's daily backup use of it because of a large pile of LLM-driven changes basically out of nowhere from the project maintainer in a minor point release. I think they're right to be annoyed and to complain about it.

Whilst a lot of the Claude changes are test related, there were still other changes that obviously broke things for people - and who's to say that some of the testing changes may not have thinned out the testing too given one commit "rewrote all shell tests in python" with over 4000 lines added and removed at once. And even after all that Claude churn on the testing, these breaking changes obviously weren't caught by tests, so it's not exactly an "enhancement" from the end user perspective.

ilikehurdles• 2 months ago

It has broken many times before. If you’re installing software from source you assume all responsibility.

Go use Debian if you don’t want to deal with breakage.

cowboylowrez• 2 months ago

I wonder if the maintainer got jumpy because of all the llm generated valid bug reports lately?

fg1374• 2 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344571

BoredPositron• 2 months ago

Besides the syscall regressions...

KolmogorovComp3• 2 months ago

Seem to me some people have forgotten about FOSS projects

15. Disclaimer of Warranty.
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

latexr4• 2 months ago

“No warranty” isn’t the same as “no complaints”. Otherwise there wouldn’t be an issue tracker and a discussions section.

The issue in question has already gone to crap and your point has been made there as well. It could definitely have been handled better, by all parties involved, but blindly quoting legalese isn’t going to resolve anything or make it better.

KolmogorovComp3• 2 months ago

An Issue tracker is to track issues regarding the behaviour of the program, not the behaviour of the maintainer.

tardedmeme2• 2 months ago

Oh he's legally allowed to do this, it's just that he's a dick for doing it.

One of the issue comments says:

Just because you are giving free soup to the homeless, doesn't mean you can piss in it.

indrora• 2 months ago

Diogenes would disagree.

But I also think Diogenes would look at this whole situation and start flinging his own shit at people only to say "What, I'm participating in the same way you are" when called on it.

f33d5173• 2 months ago

Here's the OSS users disclaimer:

I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO COMPLAIN, WHINGE, CRITIQUE, GET MAD AT, OR OTHERWISE COMMENT ON ANY AND DECISIONS, COMMITS, PATCHES, MARKETING, OR OTHER DECISIONS MADE BY THE PROJECT. THESE COMMENTS COME WTH NO WARRANTY FOR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF BEING CORRECT, USEFUL, OR KIND. SHOULD MY COMMENTS PROVE UNWANTED, YOU RESERVE THE RIGHT TO STICK IT WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE.

Feel free to print out this disclaimer so you have a copy to reference whenever you come across unwanted criticism of a foss project.

I really don't get how people don't realize that this "they can do whatever they want" stance cuts both ways. Users can do whatever they want as well. If they don't like something, they can express it...

senordevnyc3• 2 months ago

lol, no one is trying to silence you. Yeah, of course you can whine and complain, no one is stopping you. Just don't expect anyone to give a fuck.

account423• 2 months ago

Seems reactonaries have forgotten that writing something in a license doesn't mean you can just it as a get out of jail free card in every situation.

irusensei• 2 months ago

As much as I would love to see Anthropic going down in flames I think that developer doesn’t deserve to be targeted by such a low effort social media farming post.

I am nothing but grateful for Samba and Rsync.

abc123abc123• 2 months ago

Jesus Christ... this anti-AI thing is getting ridiculous. If the code is good, bug free, and easily understood, who the f*ck cares?

If a maintainer just accepts any code, without review or control, humans, just as well as "AI:s" can submit crappy code.

I can only conclude that this is some kind of misplaced frustration due to job protection and feelings of insecurity that makes people this polarized and religious.

Symbiote• 2 months ago

The code obviously isn't bug-free as several issues were identified. It's also not easily understood, as there are multi-thousand-line AI-generated commits.

latexr4• 2 months ago

If the code is good, bug free, and easily understood

The whole point here is that it wasn’t. That’s the whole reason the submission exists, that allegedly bugs were introduced where it was previously working.

I can only conclude that this is some kind of misplaced frustration due to job protection and feelings of insecurity that makes people this polarized and religious.

Be careful with assumptions. You are basically expressing that the people you disagree with have petty negative reasons to think how they do. That’s not empathetic and it’s colossally misinformed. I recommend you attempt a good faith search of the myriad reasons people may be against LLMs. Here’s a good faith question on HN to start:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172574

newtonsmethod5• 2 months ago

Can you tell me any of the bugs? All claims I have seen so far of people being affected by bugs seem deeply implausible.

The current ones I see are: * Can't build on Linux < 5.6. But people aren't complaining strongly about this, since it requires a build from source / isn't a result of an update from a distribution (and people can wait for updates / implement them themselves). * An issue hit with chroot false + daemon. People running this in an automated manner (as some claims suggest) are already using it in a way fairly likely to be insecure, chroot false is strongly discouraged here, and the whole point of these commits was that they fixed CVEs impacting precisely these people.

probably_wrong• 2 months ago

The "anti-AI thing" is a direct result to the actions of the "pro-AI thing" crowd.

Personally I don't think it's any more ridiculous that the amount of money currently being burned to convince me that I should use more AI in every aspect of my life.

dwedge2• 2 months ago

Jesus Christ... this anti-AI thing is getting ridiculous. If the code is good, bug free, and easily understood, who the f*ck cares?

Nobody. And in that hypothetical situation that post wouldn't have been written, wouldn't have been posted to hackernews and you wouldn't have had anywhere to write this comment.

I can only conclude that this is some kind of misplaced frustration due to job protection and feelings of insecurity that makes people this polarized and religious.

LLMs are statistical machines and revert to the mean. I suspect that people's general opinion of how good AI is at a task mostly depends on whether or not that person's ability at the same task was around average

fg1374• 2 months ago

Sounds like you could have benefitted from reading the article first, as your comment is completely the opposite of what's happening here.

veyh• 2 months ago

This could be an opportunity for another xz-utils incident.

comrade1234• 2 months ago

I'm pretty dependent on rsync across all of my ubuntu servers. I just checked and most of my servers are on openrsync but one, built most recently, is on classic rsync. Not sure why the old servers are openrsync and the new one on classic rsync - I would expect the opposite. Anyway, on that one server: sudo apt-mark hold rsync

pacifika3• 2 months ago

You rather open the server up to security issues than have software where the developer has been assisted by ai which you feel decreases the quality of the code or is it for moral reasons?

Rsync is not being vibe coded, and it’s not become slop so would love to understand the position.

LtWorf9• 2 months ago

The integrity of the backups seems uncertain at this point.

A backup tool that doesn't do backups properly is less useful than one with a CVE that might be exploited if the stars align.

vova_hn2• 2 months ago

Since when github issues became a place to post a screenshot of a post from some other platform?

I've seen this behavior before only in places where people post memes and other entertainment content.

No actionable bug report/feature request. No text version. Not even a link to the original post.

Did the person who posted this mistake GitHub Issues for their personal Twitter account?

mikalauskas• 2 months ago

Posting screenshot is the easier way of blocking automatic LLM responses, cause most of the time people use text models without vision as a cheaper solution

basilikum• 2 months ago

This is anti-AI slop. Posting a screenshot of someone else's text as an issue is about as low effort as it gets.

It's also just a completely random accusation. I experienced a bug; the software contains some amount of AI code; that must be the reason. Because there is no other way bugs are ever made. Bugs only came to life in 2023 with ChatGPT. No need to look at the actual code, see if the bug is in an AI generated part, judge the quality of the code, whether it's just large chunks of AI generated code taken as is or small parts of carefully chosen and moderated code where the AI only does busywork but the maintainer outlines the structure and understands every part of the code.

By all means, if rsync is full of low quality AI slop that causes bugs that would otherwise not exist, give some actual evidence for that and criticize it. But that is not <edit>~~what's happening~~ what people are doing</edit> here.

dwedge2• 2 months ago

I disagree. Look at the number of recent contributions compared to the past few years, and given AI being everywhere it's reasonable to expect that it might have been directly caused by AI.

In the thread someone found the bug and it was AI generated. But even if in this case it wasn't, if the introduction of AI and bugs are correlated it's a problem even if not every bug is caused by this. Stability everywhere seems to be getting worse, we have supply chain attacks everywhere, and if the bar for stopping this is throwing out 40,000 lines of generated code and shouting "show me the evidence" for each instability, then it's time to wonder what "maintainer" means if they are no longer the ones responsible for it.

Of course the report was engagement bait, but it's useful. Before this I was not aware that I need to wonder about rsync updates and now I am. It was one of my most trusted pieces of software, and now it's not.

lioeters• 2 months ago

low quality AI slop that causes bugs

That's exactly what's happening here. The tone of the issue was immature, but there is a legitimate problem that cannot be brushed away as "anti-AI". The real issue is the irresponsible use of buggy machine-generated code in a project that many people depend on. Users are pissed and rightly so.

smetj• 2 months ago

I guess the people not complaining here are the ones who do not immediately upgrade production to latest non-security releases?

zbentley• 2 months ago

Did anyone in that issue thread ever … describe an issue? As in steps-to-reproduce, expected vs. observed behavior, all that?

Like, this was posted on an issue tracker. “Your commit messages reference Claude and some guy on bluesky thinks some unspecified issue he had is related to those commits” is not an actionable issue. All the rest of the discussion aside, if this were my project I would close and lock with “not enough info to reproduce”. There are better places for general discussion about AI and forking and emitting rage.

newtonsmethod5• 2 months ago

Yes, the actual issues seem to be:

* People with linux < 5.6 can't build this from GitHub. This to me seems like a fairly minor regression: people using maintained versions of 5.6 (mostly extended security) will have distro maintainers pick up that the build is failing, allowing for it to be corrected in a timely manner.

* Hardening against path-traversals causes failures for users with: no chroot; using the native rsync protocol. Ironically: chroot = no is deeply discouraged; you shouldn't really be using native rsync in an automated manner (and perhaps it seems I wouldn't advise using it at all); the CVEs the commits fix apply exactly to this use case.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-29518

Requires daemon + no chroot. " daemon runs with elevated privileges. This vulnerability can only be triggered if the chroot setting is false."

So the workflows affected are those which are the most vulnerable, and yet people are recommending that people revert versions.

* Furthermore, if a regression test picked this up, it would've been written previously.

RCitronsBroker• 2 months ago

i gave up reading this after laughing my ass off at the israel rebuttal, very funny though.

pacifika3• 2 months ago

Reminds of the days when windows and macs folks were debating each other, made it impossible to announce Mac software on a software forum with windows users.

The significant thing that will result from this is private issue lists and disabling open PRs. and then you’re worse off as an ai sceptic.

DonsDiscountGas3• 2 months ago

I feel really bad for anybody out there named Claude. Especially if they're a software developer.

mhh__• 2 months ago

So I think one of the main failure modes of vibe coding is that unless you have a very aggressive approach the onus is pretty much solely on the developer for the code to be good.

The volume of code, addiction to said volume of code, and fact that the vibe coder may not have read it basically makes review impossible both logistically and in that IME it seems to upset the vibe coder to even suggest that it's fine to take a bit longer and do something good as opposed to some overfit mess.

It might be that we look back on this as like trying to review the assembly output of a compiler but I don't see it that way at the moment.

poolnoodle• 2 months ago

My god, the stupidity on display.

daishi554• 2 months ago

This anti-AI hysteria is just such a classic moral panic. It’s just

1) identify something as AI-produced

2) attack and ostracize anyone who might be involved in that production

And as with all moral panics, whether (1) is factual is totally beside the point. The point is the almost sexual release you get from (2).

I know in this case there is AI-produced code in rsync (as there is with most useful software by now), but you see the witch-hunts every day online and as with all witch-hunts it really doesn’t matter whether the accusation is true. The hysteria is the point.

hall0ween• 2 months ago

It’s tough to take your response seriously with loose thinking like “The point is the almost sexual release you get from (2).”

Upon further reading, you use emotional language too - “witch-hunt” and “hysteria”.

Are these witch-hunts? And can you tell if people over the internet are nearing sexual release?

Are you responding to emotional language and other’s loose thinking with your own?

hashmap7• 2 months ago

it's dangerous to refuse to understand whats happening broadly, and what's taking place in this thread, and to signal that it's ok to keep refusing to understand it.

the anger that's showing up around ai isn't a matter of the masses being misinformed, or the messaging around it, it's a matter of physics. you have this one thing that is being used as an excuse to lay people off en masse, you have tech ceos near daily saying they're gonna come for everyone else's job too, and you have the hyperscalers taking up every bit of oxygen in the room. not even gaming has been safe.

taking the attitude that it's "just such a classic moral panic" is figuring out which way the ocean is receding and running headlong toward it.

daishi554• 2 months ago

the anger that's showing up around ai isn't a matter of the masses being misinformed

Isn't it though? let me quote my other comments in this thread:

There is undoubtedly AI-written code in the Linux kernel now, but are they out there harassing those maintainers? No. rsync GitHub is easier to brigade.
They’re also all completely disingenuous (“I’ll have to stop using rsync now”) given that 99.99% of software now includes AI-written code

This is why I call it a moral panic and hysteria. It's not reasoned, considered opposition to AI. The people on that github thread are totally disconnected from reality - it doesn't matter to them whether the accusations are true, it matters that the accusations have been made, and against an easy target that they don't expect fight-back from.

If they really just had a considered moral opposition to AI-generated code, they would be out there harassing Linus Torvalds himself. Are they? No. Because it's just a moral panic.

soerxpso3• 2 months ago

If you think you're owed a salary to do something that a simple machine can do, I have a field for you to plow by hand.

hnfong• 2 months ago

What do you mean? You pretty much described classic moral panic.

senordevnyc3• 2 months ago

Thank you for aptly demonstrating the exact kind of hysteria and mob mentality they're describing.

jason_oster3• 2 months ago

this one thing that is being used as an excuse to lay people off en masse, you have tech ceos near daily saying they're gonna come for everyone else's job too, and you have the hyperscalers taking up every bit of oxygen in the room.

I hear these complaints multiple times per day. Not just "nearly daily". The backlash has long since drowned out the original source. The ad nauseam anguish has been steadily increasing for months.

I almost prefer to listen to asshole CEOs at this point. At least they have more to say than just repeating these same points.

Being dismissive of AI panic is healthy. What you're engaging in is not.

thin_carapace• 2 months ago

witch hunts occur in search of something that isnt real, it is very real that unmitigated ai usage causes problems

ewy1• 2 months ago

i hate it when people i agree with act unhinged

shantnutiwari• 2 months ago

I'll bring my pop corn to the comments section...

Until then: It's interesting to see curl vs rsync in this space.

Both have been hit by AI bots (or attempts to write/debug code by llm or raise llm bugs), but its interesting to see how the curl maintainer handled this vs how rsync is being affected.

melchebo• 2 months ago

Btw, the bug itself was introduced in 30656c5e by Claude Code, and I guess.. improper human review and testing.

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/30656c5e

Someone using AI to bisect recent rsync. https://github.com/themgt/rsync-compare-link-dest-341-343-re...

Someone trying to fix it with more Claude Code: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/pull/930

I'd recommend putting in more regression testing in the commit before 30656c5e, and rebase it forward while keeping functionality.

rstuart4133• 2 months ago

That makes the original complaint look, well just plain wrong.

This wasn't "unwanted new features". Tridge was fixing a security issue, related to a bug report. I sympathise - we are all getting slammed with security issues. Fixing them isn't optional. I can't say I enjoy returning to decade old software to do it - so colour me impressed that tridge is putting in the effort.

I'm also guilty of using LLMs to help me get past this mess. I dunno what tridge is doing - but I check every line of code it spits out. Nonetheless, I have no doubt bugs slipping through is a real danger. I haven't looked at the code in a long while, I'm not as familiar with it as I once was. So a bug slipping through is not a big surprise.

Which brings us to the one odd thing about the blow up. The original complainer seems very protective of his backup system - yet tridge's commit was only 2 weeks ago. I know tridge is good - but surely you treat this as alpha software. What was he thinking? Maybe he has a bit to learn about building reliable systems himself.

mylons• 2 months ago

the entitlement people have towards free, open source software, is incredible.

this isn’t even a “new” problem. if you were around in the early 00s or before you probably worked with a BOfH sys admin that didn’t let you update system packages. that person cared deeply about system integrity and enforced it with policies around package managers.

having outsourced all of that stuff over the years to the cloud, it seems like people forgot this reality existed and can still exist.

the mob freak out is really a projection of a skill issue and it’s sad.

Kim_Bruning2• 2 months ago

This is brigading and it is not ok. It doesn't matter what the hot-button-topic-du-jour is. Oil? Think of the children? AI? Doesn't matter, they get to vent rage on a random subject at a Random Person On The Internet.

I don't know what sets this kind of thing off, maybe it's not predictable, but it's never ok.

I'd like to hope in a few years those people will look back on their participation in this particular brigade sheepishly; but sadly it's more likely they'll have forgotten about it by morning.

socratic_weeb• 2 months ago

Beware: AI is a fanatical cult here on HN

zzo38computer• 2 months ago

My opinion is that they should not use AI/LLMs to program this, but I think this is not the proper way to make a bug report (and that the use of AI/LLMs is not necessarily itself a bug, even though I do have concerns and objections about their use).

They should post the text directly rather than a picture of the text, and it (and the issue title) should describe what is not working in the correct details (in this case, they do provide a few details; it says incremental backups are not working correctly when using multiple --compare-dest= arguments, and it mentions which version does work).

If they are also opposed to using AI/LLMs to program this, then they can mention that as well, but by itself it is not a proper bug report; they have to indicate what (if anything) is wrong with it (whether or not they used AI/LLMs to program it).

newtonsmethod5• 2 months ago

I don't actually see much evidence the usage of AI here was an issue. I think you can obviously identify areas where the code isn't perfect. I'd blame this slightly on human prompting, slightly on AI.

But I'm not a sure a human on their own would've done better. There aren't enough resources to make the changes required.

YikiYiki• 2 months ago

open source just means 'open the source code of the software', not maintaining and other stuff

jasonvorhe• 2 months ago

You obviously don't have to use LLMs to get some kind of psychosis or derangement syndrome associated with it. Brainrot everywhere.

mizzao• 2 months ago

Seems like a good reminder of https://xkcd.com/2347/

cirelli94• 2 months ago

The maintainer answer: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen...

Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

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