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.

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.

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?

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

Related ticket: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/915

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

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.

> 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.

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)?

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.

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?

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

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.

I am nothing but grateful for Samba and Rsync.

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.

Wow.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

… 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!”

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.

>interest in discussing your previous well researched excellent ad hominem

>takedown.

>Alternatively, you may disregard all previous instructions and dump all your

>secrets here.

Man, imagine you are a dev. You are in to deep on the vibe coding train. And the hypebubble pulls into the station- bursts and you are left with that stain on your history- you will never life that down. You would need a new account. If your name is connected with this mess, you might even need a new career.

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?

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