alt Hacker NewsPlease Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software
Comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
Hm good timing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334854 (OpenRsync)
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?
Genuinely wondering though: is the problem that the patch was vibe coded, or is that no one reviewed the changes?
When people realize the AI doesn’t work in the long run we can have a mass revert party
> 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...
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?
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
AI for me but not for thee.
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.
Torture testing required before acceptance of vibed/AI submissions?
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.
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.
Just use openrsync instead. And OpenBSD for that matter. There goes the bazar…
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.
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.
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.
>I have no interest in threatening you. I just want to avoid software made by >you or touched by you. I have no other interest in your comments or indeed any
>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.
Can GitHub add a tag to repositories that says "probably vibe coded" or "ai code detected"
previous convo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334021, has my comment so won't repeat myself.
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.
Aww, but I have such big plans for it!
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.
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Frankly, to me it looks like Tridge started off as a talented but broke student with high ideals expressed through open source execution and has since gone off the rails and is now full time engaged in profiting from building weapons systems. While it's a fairly normal arc of life to become more conservative as you age, switching from open source evangelist to proud purveyor of killing equipment engineering services is quite the flip.
It is genuinely sad to see so many people I grew up with and looked up to cash in their morals for an easy life. We have options, people. Don't do it.
"Our true nationality is mankind." - H. G. Wells
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!”
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.
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
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?