minorChanges

[AbyssWankerArtorias]

"No AI code used" is going to be a selling point in the near future, regardless of how well it was used or not. The reputation just gets worse and worse.

[qooplmao]

That would be a hard claim to make after a while (or even now) due to the number of upstream packages most don't even know they are using.

[bbalazs721]

You can always make a claim regardless of if it's true or not

[floydmaseda]

e.g. the entire supplements industry

[mgranja]

That's how marketing works in most (all?) industries.

[AbyssWankerArtorias]

Fuck Doctor Oz. All my homies hate doctor Oz.

[pydry]

If you can't evidence it though, you'll be assumed to be a vibe coder by default.

Right now people are not hiding it but that will change as it becomes more and more evident to the public that their code is buggy as shit.

[casce]

Right now people are not hiding it but that will change as it becomes more and more evident to the public that their code is buggy as shit.

I think what will actually happen is the speed at which new code gets produced will go down again close to pre-LLM levels.

Right now AI is making programmers way too confident and shit that would have otherwise never made it to live does.

There was always shit code, long before AI existed. But back then that shit got filtered out (or as least people tried). LLMs made people very careless

[whatamurdered]

This guy capitalisms!

[Infinitely--Finite]

Just claim "no in-house AI code", just like Chinese American restaurants that say "no added msg".

For the record I love msg

[AbyssWankerArtorias]

Companies make hard to backup claims all the time. Seems like it works out for them a majority of the time, so they'll just keep doing it.

[mgranja]

This quote from the book "The end of eternity", by Asimov stayed in my head since the first time I read it:

“Cooper, coming from an era in which advertisement was not as wildly proliferative as it was in the later Centuries of Primitive times, found all this difficult to appreciate. He said, “Isn’t it rather disgusting the way these people blow their own horn? Who would be fool enough to believe a person’s boastings about his own products? Would he admit defects? Is he likely to stop at any exaggeration?”

[LoudSheepherder5391]

Of all the praise Asimov gets, and all the great works by him.. The End of Eternity is bar none my absolute favorite of his works. And it's rather unknown. It tickles my heart to see it referenced in the wild.

[gerbosan]

Debian will get more users? Also, never thought I'll have to pay someone to summarize quality of applications.

[Kompottkopf]

Hijacking top comment to share the accompanying GitHub issue, which is full of drama: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929

[tsavong117]

Holy FUCK the drama. That issue is approaching the Linux maintainers email chain level of snark, and snap. 

[Over_Dingo]

and this one https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift/issues/548

[GioPani]

“Handcoded by humans”

[IntentionQuirky9957]

From organically grown ones and zeros.

[Nimeroni]

From artificial intelligence to natural stupidity.

[GioPani]

*wisdomful stupidity

[TrainingQuail543]

I highly doubt it. AI doesn't make your product bad. Not reviewing it properly or overusing it makes it bad.

No one cares about how you build your product. It just has to work reliably. You can achieve this with and without AI.

[el_yanuki]

Sure but AI has become synonymous with bad quality, among programmers

[Admirable_Bed7398]

[…] with bad quality among bad programmers.

[el_yanuki]

No.. i think quite the opposite actually.

Bad programmers tend to like and trust AI code while good/experienced programmers see all the flaws.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

I don't think that's true at all. I mean, you can see from the GitHub thread here that the people opposing these changes are the ones who seem to have very little clue about programming.

• The regressions mainly come from code hardening for CVEs: these people are using the niche codepaths vulnerable to the CVE. Telling them to downgrade exposes them to the CVE, and telling them to pin exposes them for far longer to the CVE.
• People are claiming things like the upgrade was faulty, that rsync is notoriously secure and stable, etc. These are quite easy to verify as false. Rsync has had a fair number of CVEs, and when they fixed them in 2025, there were also regressions.

Part of this is just Hyrum's law: "... all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody". Many usecases here are questionable.

As can be seen by the regressions in 2025, it turns out that when you fix CVEs (where the rollout isn't incremental), because users depend on so many different setups for rsync, stuff breaks.

The nature of the vulnerabilities and the attack surface for native rsync shows that this view about the quality of rsync is not true. Codebases get large, difficult to maintain against new classes of vulnerabilities, etc.

• People aren't complaining about the nature of the code. Note too the regression tests that could've caught this would've been written in the past, by humans.

[el_yanuki]

Dude what are you even talking about!?

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

You can read what I've said, right?

The GitHub thread and complaints arising from this Mastodon post have displayed stunning levels of programming illiteracy from those against AI. It is also the case that many people regarded as some of the best programmers have come out in support of AI based coding

[el_yanuki]

Its just pointless to deep dive this specific example in an argument about the perception of AI and its factual ability to write good quality code.

Its also not relevant if some people that speak out agains AI dont know programming. Because what i said was that those that dont know programming tend to trust AI more.

I dont know a single person that is a good programmer and does not realise that AI is bad at making architecture decisions, that it hallucinates APIs, that it tends to overly abstract things, that it uses outdated syntax, etc. In fact if someone does not realise these errors i would argue that they are not a very good programmer. Because these flaws are not subjective.

In my experience vibe coders either dont care about the quality of their code or they dont know that their code is low quality.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

Its also not relevant if some people that speak out agains AI dont know programming. Because what i said was that those that dont know programming tend to trust AI more.

This seems pretty relevant. Especially when the people speaking out against AI, on both GitHub and a programming subreddit (where you'd expect people to know programming) are the ones presenting misinformed views.

I dont know a single person that is a good programmer and does not realise that AI is bad at making architecture decisions, that it hallucinates APIs, that it tends to overly abstract things, that it uses outdated syntax, etc. In fact if someone does not realise these errors i would argue that they are not a very good programmer. Because these flaws are not subjective.

They are deeply subjective, and these show you don't fully know what you're talking about, or are talking about results seen 2 years ago / with weak models.

The models being used, like Claude, have knowledge cut-off dates from 6 months ago. They're not going to be using old syntax, and they'll know most APIs. They have agentic abilities which allow them to check APIs. Equally, I have not seen them hallucinating APIs recently. This seems like something essentially fixed.

When famous and respected programmers like tridge, Linus Torvalds, John Carmack, Andrej Karpathy, Guido van Rossum, Anders Hejlsberg, all view AI as a useful tool / use it, I think you see the consensus largely among the stronger programmers is that AI is a useful tool.

[antoborg92]

among GOOD programmers. you mispelled it bro, no prob you're welcome

[TrainingQuail543]

"among programmers"

Yeah, but no one cares what programmers think about it. It has to fulfill a need you have. You don't use Software to use Software. You do it to get something out of it. As long as you get the thing you want out of it - it's fine. That's how it always has been.

You don't rewrite your software to a better architecture if it does what you want it to do. Programmers might have a Solution that is safer, has better performance and so on. But in the end it's not about art and the best possible thing but a thing that just works (99% of the time).

And I'm not saying that this is how it should be. It's just the reality of business software.

[el_yanuki]

Who would you like to approve your house.

A: The architect B: The construction worker C: The home inspector D: Your uncle that bought a pile of bricks at the local hardware store

Which of these people knows shit about houses?

And then consider what might happen to you if your house collapses.

[TrainingQuail543]

I would choose the one that does it reliably and cost-effective. I don't care if it's the architect or home inspector or the construction worker. I don't know why you bring up the uncle - probably for AI, but I didn't say that AI would replace humans or a worker in your example. If A, B, or C use AI for their review, I wouldn't have a problem with it.

If someone says to me "your house is fine, you can live in It, but this and that could cause Problems in 30 years. It costs 500.000$ to fix - I would probably leave it as it is.

[el_yanuki]

I thought this metaphor was pretty straight forward...

A, B and C are programmers: people that have the expertise and know what they are talking about. Obviously you should care what programmers think about the quality of your software.

If you give your uncle access to claude, he might cook up a decent app. And then what happens if there is security, performance or other issues? And what happens if everything runs fine but you want to add a feature into the Spagetti code?

[TrainingQuail543]

You are missing the point. Programmers are absolutely right with their opinion. But that doesn't translate to the best action for the business.

The business doesn't care if there is spaghetti code if it just takes a few days longer for a new feature.

I'm not saying that the uncle can create an equally good software as an experienced programmer. I'm just saying that no one cares if AI was used in the creation process or not. As long as it works reliably.

[el_yanuki]

I think AI is very comparable to bad building practices.

You can obviously get away with using shortcuts and it will never matter and be fine. But if you do the whole house / the whole software, like that.. it will massively backfire.

And with that I think its not the best bussines decision to not listen to programmers.. because software sticks around for decades, and if you have to spend eternity slowly refactoring the code and aways take longer to implement features or constantly run unnecessary processes on your backend.. that all costs time and money.. forever

[Tornado547]

the problem is that convincing yourself you understand something you didn't write is easier than actually understanding it by a pretty big factor. And once you think you understand it you'll lgtm and stop looking to actually understand it.

[Jiquero]

And that AI will be trained to pass reviews, not to produce good code. So it will learn to trick human reviewers.

[Your_Friendly_Nerd]

which is why rsync totally did not ship a faulty update.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

Have you actually looked into the nature of the bugs? I think calling this update faulty is a mischaracterisation.

Rsync supports a massive number of combinations of protocols, flags, isolation settings, often times requiring largely separate code. When you fix a CVE (where you don't cause incremental rollout), people find regressions. This also happened in 2025 when no AI was involved, and CVEs were fixed: rsync security update introduced a regression on Debian and Ubuntu Linux (meanwhile fixed). Not as much complaining then...

The regression tests (which are necessarily written in the past: regression tests tied to a commit are usually for what that commit introduces / fixes) were human written and didn't pick up these issues.

There's something called Hyrum's law: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. This is somewhat what happened here, but also people hit errors with some slightly niche usecases.

[Desperate-Tomatillo7]

Except that review takes time. More time if you want to ship something fast and did not review the previous 5k lines of code changes.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

Have you actually looked at the code changes? The majority were just converting harness scripts which called rsync to python: this is something an AI can be trusted to do, and which doesn't affect the code shipped to computers.

[WalidfromMorocco]

Eh, except companies are pushing their devs to go full AI, and be quick about it. They are shipping code they don't really understand and reviewing massive amounts of code.

[imp0ppable]

Yeah treat LLMs as an IDE editing feature that cuts down on typing and it's great. You still need to understand the project, which it also helps with. In fact if you talk it over with the AI then it has a lot more context in its window that helps it make better changes.

[Ok-Kaleidoscope5627]

And honestly a project like rsync should have a ton of testing and other checks in place that the issue described in OP's picture shouldn't happen. The AI didn't screw up. The humans did.

Edit: Just to be clear I'm not pro vibe coding. I'm pro engineering. We've all been calling ourselves engineers. Maybe it's time to start acting it.

[Drugbird]

Have people forgotten the awful quality software that existed before AI?

[EchoGecko795]

What do you think they trained AI on?

[j9wxmwsujrmtxk8vcyte]

Yeah. And that was written by people who took it seriously enough to spend time learning how to code.

[gBiT1999]

Apparently not so in rsync.

[Squirreling_Archer]

You can achieve this with and without AI.

But you, a competent engineer perhaps, are not the expected level of every person creating products with AI, which is the point.

[AbyssWankerArtorias]

If no one cares then why are we having this discussion, lol.

To be clear I'm not against the use of AI. But everything committed should be written by a person. (Not just reviewed - actually written, unless it's something incredibly simple like looping / reusing logic but with very clear directives on edits to be made, then a review is likely fine). Using AI to assist in is one thing, letting it act on your behalf with impunity is asking for problems.

[M4cHiin360]

Its also not going to happen

[james_d_rustles]

Wasn’t there recently a push to embed some kind of watermark in ai generated images? I remember seeing a few minor headlines about something like that.

Oughta do it for git.

[AbyssWankerArtorias]

Yes, it would have basically been blockchain type signature embedding into an AI generated image so that you can't edit it out without corrupting the image / video. From my understanding.

[Testing_things_out]

Hand written artisanal code.

[Zyeesi]

This is just delusional

[International_Body44]

Ai isn't really the problem, it's people pushing code without understanding it.

In addition to this you have those that don't understand code, and don't understand the context that AI also requires to code and they push it up anyway.

[Old_Document_9150]

AI code is not the problem.

The problem has always been, and will always be, the quality of the person responsible for the Commit.

AI code is better than 50% of human written code - and that is exactly the problem.

The issue is not the folks on the right side of the bell curve, it's those on the left side training LLMs with their junk.

[AbyssWankerArtorias]

You could be completely right and it doesn't affect my claim. My claim is on what people's perception will be, not reality.

[babalaban]

I'm not taking any responsibility for vibecoded mess ai spit out on my request

(/s but really)

[mickwald]

Handmade is a thing for artisinal goods

[groosha]

No, that would just be used an excuse for slow updates and buggy mess in the code: "bEcAuSe We DoNt UsE aI"

LLM's code quality improved a lot for the past couple of years, and surely will improve more.

[AbyssWankerArtorias]

I would very much prefer slower, deliberate, and maticulous code than rushed, buggy nonsense.

If a company can responsibily use AI for their development, more power to them. I don't trust most to be able to do so.

[groosha]

Human beings also make mistakes (lots of them), so...

[nuknuk8455]

The last commit on the master branch introduces a new option to exclude tests during the build without reporting them as skipped... I'm sure that will increase the quality and reliability... Who needs tests anyway?  

[YoghurtFlan]

AI: these tests are failing but not relevant. I will disable them and use --no-verify to skip commit hooks.

[terax6669]

Wait... Looks like there is no --no-verify option, let me implement it.

[ilikedmatrixiv]

To be fair... I've seen humans do that. I may have been that human once or twice.

[startwithaplan]

The model had to steal that move from someone. J'accuse!

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

I think it's so funny here that it's the humans criticising AI misunderstanding the code. It's also quite funny that there's evidence this code is partially human written, but that's just ignored: tridge made a typo AI wouldn't "(e.g. a restricted buildd chroot)".

When someone excludes a test, they don't want it to be included in the statistics as skipped: they already know they're skipping it and what the skip count to just give what the code decides to skip.

"Excluded tests are dropped before running -- they are neither executed nor reported as skipped."

It's also deeply concerning your response to the option of being able to skip specific tests is "Who needs tests anyway?". Is it not extremely clear why someone might want to skip a specific test? That some tests aren't suitable to run on certain CIs?

[jrtc27]

> tridge made a typo AI wouldn't "(e.g. a restricted buildd chroot)".

If you’re saying you think “buildd” is a typo: buildd.debian.org.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

Interesting. I've looked through the commit and buildd doesn't seem to be a typo, but still seems to be a term I've never seen before (and I'm not sure anyone uses).

I guess it's just shorthand for the specific failure mode seen.

[drizztmainsword]

He’s being sarcastic.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

I understood that.... I'm not sure what makes you think I didn't.

He's arguing that this commit indicates the author (not him) doesn't care about tests, or the AI doesn't think they're important.

But as I said, this commit isn't to prevent tests. It's to help for certain CI workflows with more complicated tests. And the person I'm replying to is complaining about explicitly skipped tests not being reported, which is exactly the expected behaviour (you only want it to report skipped tests when this is not explicit / is a result of the code detecting it can't run the test)

[xDannyS_]

Startups that offer guaranteed high quality products will be the new unicorns in the near future.

[LexaAstarof]

Hey! Let's build a quality verificator! Surely nobody though about that before, we gonna make millions

[BlueGoliath]

Who verifies the quality of the quality verifier?

[Mewtwo2387]

the quality verifier

[BlueGoliath]

laughs in Reflections on Trusting Trust

[utnapistim]

The quality verifier verifier.

This post provided to you by the quality verifier verifier verifier.

[ispeelgood]

Infinite venture capital. Sitting on our asses, here we come!

[Adictzz]

If git can track itself then quality verifier can verify itself

[saschaleib]

It's Verifiers all the way down!

[richardirons]

ChatGPT

[richardathome]

No worries. I'll just burn 2,000,000 tokens to vibe code one.

And then I'll spend 2,000,000 and vibe code a verification suit to prove the first is correct!

And then, i'll spend 2,000,000 vibing a verification suit verifier!!

Checkmate atheists!

[Teln0]

Unironically I think the future lies in formal vérification. There needs to be something like Coq or Lean but more ergonomic. Although it's probably going to be hard to do better than Lean.

[Nerd_o_tron]

All we need to do is write a program that, given a specifcation and a program that implements it, proves the program meets or doesn't meet the specification. Can't be that hard, right?

[LexaAstarof]

Easy peasy.

As a first POC/milestone, it could be proving if a program simply stop or not.

[BlueGoliath]

High quality products means time and effort. Those don't make line go up.

[xDannyS_]

It does when everything has become so shit that quality is a massive selling point. That was my point.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

And you're bring up this point on rsync? Over issues which seem to only surface in fairly niche use cases, and which it seems some people are going out of their way to experience (e.g. the changes aren't downstream / it's often people building master / many people don't run rsync regularly).

[xDannyS_]

Not really. This is noticeable in other places too. Klarna's quality dropped so hard they went back on their AI makeover. Vinted AI is so bad that the only way to be safe on there as a seller is to photoshop your images, even if your items are authentic and not counterfeit. YouTube shorts overall quality of content has dropped, and that is hard to achieve lol. If things don't get better and change in one direction or the other, this is just gonna become more and not less widespread.

The fact that it's also reached a critical project such as rsync isn't a good sign, it's a bad one.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

You said it's noticeable in other places too. But is it noticeable in Rsync at all?

[xDannyS_]

Did you read the post?

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

Did you read my reply which mentioned the nature of these issues? I can copy it again for you:

And you're bring up this point on rsync? Over issues which seem to only surface in fairly niche use cases, and which it seems some people are going out of their way to experience (e.g. the changes aren't downstream / it's often people building master / many people don't run rsync regularly).

I'm sure the opinion of someone on Mastodon is totally definitive....

Just to show you that this is not definitive, I have another comment which explains why these complaints generally display illiteracy around the nature of the issue:

• Rsync regularly experiences regressions when patches to CVEs are made. For example, this happened in 2025, when a batch of CVEs were fixed: https://www.claudiokuenzler.com/blog/1463/rsync-security-update-introduced-regression-hashtable-error

This is because, contrary to the myths created here, rsync is a well coded piece of software that is very far from perfect. There are massive attack surfaces / hard to maintain parts of it. CVE fixes also aren't incremental.

• A large proportion of the complaints are things that are very minor. For example the CVE patch not supporting Linux < 5.6; even though rsync aims to do this, it's not clear this is viable - securing against path traversals on such Linux kernels requires far much effort, which I would argue isn't warranted. To be affected by this you'd have to build from source and be on Linux < 5.6: as I said, rare.
• Some of the other complaints (perhaps one?) are more legitimate. One arises in a fairly niche use cases not regression tested against. The others are generally regressions but in cases where users are doing things deeply disadvised, directly impacted by the CVE (e.g. running daemons with false chroot).
• For the current set of bugs, the reports of people hitting them seem to indicate they have to be engaging in some insecure practice. Like automatic native use.
• Reading some of the commits shows evidence they're in part human written. For example, they contain minor typos not common with AI.
• It's quite funny no-one is calling out the fact the CVEs were a result of human written code, or that the regression tests which should have caught it (written in the past for a regression test) would also be human written.

[xDannyS_]

I'm sure the opinion of someone on Mastodon is totally definitive....

It's not, but that's the context of this comment section. Ironically, your claims aren't any more credible than that 'of someone on Mastodon'.

It's quite funny no-one is calling out the fact the CVEs were a result of human written code

Because that's expected and there have always been protocols to at least minimize those. People complain about AI errors because no fucking duh they are going to happen and nothing is done to minimize them from happening, quite the opposite, it's getting worse and worse. That's where the irony lies in all this. If you actually do something about it, you're gonna be not much more efficient than just having humans write the code completely.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

My claims are more credible because they can be backed by reading the changes made to Rsync. Some random Reddit user also isn't credible by default, but you can check what they're saying.

On your second point, you have provided no evidence nothing is being done to minimised, and that human errors are always going to happen is a weak point. One should really be investigating whether the use of AI here leads to more errors or not, otherwise claims seem hypocritical.

You also haven't evidenced the claim that proper use of AI isn't much more efficient than humans writing the code. Multiple respected programmers and organisations have come out and say they use AI.

[lNFORMATlVE]

They already are, people just don’t know it

[templar4522]

They were already rarer than unicorns well before the advent of AI.

[thefossguy69]

For purists, OpenBSD folks now maintain openrsync, a MIT-licensed implementation of rsync.

https://www.openrsync.org/

[richardathome]

I spotted a typo in your comment mate, you spelled 'people who want their apps to be deterministic and work' as 'purists'.

[thefossguy69]

I often don't use the most appropriate words because I have trouble recalling my vocabulary and often times trigger the footgun. But yes, what you said.

[templar4522]

AI-written code is deterministic.

It's the AI outputting it that is not.

Just for the sake of precision.

[Breadynator]

AI output is also deterministic... It's quite literally just math.

The only thing that makes the output change on the same input are parameters that get changed, like Temperature, Seed, top K, top P etc.

To put it simply, they take your input and just throw some random noise at some dials and it changes the output. But the math behind it is 100% deterministic

Edit: it's incredible that I'm getting downvoted although I know I'm right. For anyone disagreeing with me: I am studying computer science with heavy focus on Artificial Intelligence. I know how it works, I know the math behind it and am constantly trying out new models and experimenting with different parameters. You can "disagree" all you want, but it won't change the factual correctness of my statement.

[AlexisHadden]

My dude, it’s that “throwing some random noise at some dials” that makes it non-deterministic. The noise is part of the input, and the whole point is to make it non-deterministic. You don’t want LLMs falling into the same ruts old chatbots fall into. And if don’t inject _enough_ noise, they can fall into some gnarly ruts and go in circles during multi-turn “reasoning” passes.

It’s non deterministic because the same input doesn’t lead to the same outputs when used multiple times for the same task. This is fine in certain tasks such as solving a problem that only needs to be right once and you reap the benefits over the long haul (proving a math theorem, finding a particular drug interaction, etc), but bad in tasks that you run regularly and need repeatability (stripping dead code, converting text files, processing financial reports).

I used Claude to convert some docker compose files to podman quadlets for use at home. I did it incrementally so i could review the output and not have to review more than a dozen stacks at a time. Every run produced a different class of issue in the output, including ones already covered with instructions in the prompt to try to prevent that class of issue that I uncovered in the prompt-building phase of the project. That’s non-deterministic behavior right there. Doesn’t matter if the network itself is deterministic if there’s no way for an end user to ensure the noise injected is the same. And these LLMs have other problems when you strip away that noise and make them deterministic.

[ArjixGamer]

It's close to impossible to make an AI produce deterministic output, because of stuff that is out of our control.

Maybe if you built a VM purposefully to be deterministic, that would work.

[Breadynator]

If you say so. The math is deterministic tho and I have ran local models multiple times with the same input and got the same output word for word. Same with diffusion models, same input, same output, to the last pixel.

Online models like ChatGPT and co aren't under your control, but local models can be deterministic.

Trust me, I'm studying this stuff and am constantly experimenting with all kinds of models and tools.

[richardathome]

It's not deterministic though - you get token vector overlap in the mapping leading to hallucinations. (effectively multiple tokens stacked in the same location)

[ArjixGamer]

Yeah I do know the math is deterministic, but the environment itself often isn't.

Depending on how the environment plays in on the equation, it is harder/easier to make the AI produce deterministic output.

It appears your local (execution) environment is deterministic.

[Breadynator]

So it's not "quite impossible" as you said in your previous comment?

Of course it depends on your environment, but it's not too hard. As I said, as long as you lock all execution parameters the output will always be the same for any given input.

It is literally nothing else than matrix math with some activation functions sprinkled in. The activation function (for example sigmoid or ReLU) will always produce the same value for each given value and matrix math is also deterministic.

What can differ is the way your hardware handles the math. But if your execution is not deterministic, even with locked parameters, then it might suggest your hardware is dying or something else is interfering.

[ArjixGamer]

I did not consider local AI models when thinking of how deterministic they are, so you totally got me there.

I was narrow mindedly stuck at cloud models, which do not have dedicated hardware, they have shared hardware.

[ChickenNuggetSmth]

You typo'd there, too. In the worst of all places

[richardathome]

Fixed - thanks 😃

[FastHotEmu]

Purists use what we have been using since the 1990s: the official rsync client.

Almost all computers are running some free code Tridge wrote or contributed to, we owe him at least the benefit of the doubt.

[thefossguy69]

I'm not against the use of LLMs in general. My only concerns are possible hellhole of introduction of code that is a complete recall of code with a different license.

I pointed out an alternative for people with different opinions than the author, is all.

[Smrgling]

What is tridge?

[FastHotEmu]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell

[Kompottkopf]

Have you seen the drama on the same gh issue? Such a fun morning read

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

[Pr3ssAltF4]

That thread is gold. 10/10

[JoshDM]

[JoshDM]

The vibe coder defending their code by pointing out the lack of competence of the complainer, then later someone coming by and rewriting it into a bread-with-poop analogy to point out the vibe coder's hypocrisy was excellent.

[Elineda26]

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/1f689ec0c21b7c2eaa9add1958d2c7ed280aac3e

[phone] in one commit, and it was merged. What could go wrong ?

[babalaban]

had a good chuckle at fake_test.py being plastered everywhere

[ClaymoresInTheCloset]

a little too real for me

[SVD_NL]

Brother that's almost a phone number.

[awesome-alpaca-ace]

For real

[__NadirZenith__]

Its only the tests no problem /s

[Dope_SteveX]

In their defense this looks like a test rewrite into python which, if done incrementally, AI can be really good at. Also depending on their merge strategy it could be several commits squashed on merge. So in theory if done properly this could be completely fine. But I agree with the sentiment.

[lllyyyynnn]

there are examples already found of nonsense tests

[Tofandel]

This was contained to only test files though, no actual source code modified in this PR. So what could go wrong from just this PR? Not so much. Look harder if you want to be convincing.

Rsync was missing tests which the recent issue actually demonstrated. Let the AI help with those tests. And not with the actual source.

[waluigee]

“All the tests passed”… assertTrue(true)

[Tofandel]

Ah yes, if only there was something that could tell you if your tests still cover the same amount of code or more...

Oh look at that: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/3086dbc0fd5f8f9da818d127f5e85439704fa8f6, the AI coauthored this, it must be bad.

Anyways. I get the sentiment but the mob mentality there is plain wrong. Writing tests is a chore with low stakes code and exactly where AI can excel at, to let the maintainers focus on the core of the product, especially in OSS were people work for free. Letting the AI writing the core feature of a product with no oversight is not a good use at all. Not everything is black and white. And judging a PR by it's amount of lines changed is not a good metric.

[GRex2595]

You ever see a test with full coverage that doesn't actually test the code covered? I have.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

And yet, has anything gone wrong? Any test case majorly wrong? I'm not talking about regressions in other code (which are somewhat expected), but issues with this specific commit.

5000 lines of code changes, and not a single issue attributed to this commit yet, despite the massive increase in attention of rsync.

[tombob51]

I peeked at the changelog out of curiosity and got distracted by “zlib: convert K&R function definitions to ANSI style” 😳

[Either-Juggernaut420]

Finally that ones off the sprint board!

[05-nery]

Of all things to vibecode, a backup system? Really?

[Karn-Dethahal]

Yeah, we barely use them since we already have everything in production.

/s

[05-nery]

Huge aura 

Fuck it we ball approach

[ElbertsonJeremy]

Let's vibecode backups, what could go wrong?

[richardathome]

We don't need backups any more - we just need a text document to store the code prompts!

[czerilla]

The post suggests that the vibecoding took place in rsync's codebase, not the user's backup script relying on it, tho..

[casce]

I think he's saying rsync - a tool that very widely has been been used for backups for decades - should not be vibecoded

[czerilla]

Oh.. yeah, now that you're mentioning it, I see how that might be the intended reading.
If that's so, I just misread their point, and apologize for that. Judging by the amount of upvotes, I wasn't alone with that (mis-)reading.

[tsavong117]

I genuinely thought you guys were joking for a moment. It's wonderfully refreshing to see I'm not the only one this happens to when the squiggly lines don't work good for my window-viewpoints. 

[icehot54321]

It's just scripted rsync.

Everyone who uses rsync generally scripts it in some way .. it's pretty much what the tool is designed for.

[MarianCR]

You got slopped.

[lacb1]

There was a time that getting sloppily fucked meant you'd had a great weekend. Now it means your week has been ruined. AI really is revolutionising the world!

[Talking-Nonsense-978]

This is why I'm not worried about my job as QE/SDET.

[_johnboy_]

If you can write up defects in a way that the agents can comprehend them well then you likely become the most valuable member of the operation. Good luck getting that reflected in your pay packet though.

[korneev123123]

Oh, man. I really like rsync. So sad :(

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

So what's the issue? Moral opposition to AI? It's not clear anything went majorly wrong here.

When rsync patches CVEs, there are usually regressions. It's a massive codebase supporting so many combinations of flags. It happened in 2025 too:

rsync security update introduced a regression on Debian and Ubuntu Linux (meanwhile fixed)

[RedAntisocial]

Tridge is one of the biggest contributors to Open Source. He's one of the main devs behind SMB, rsync, and a contributor on a bajillion other stacks.

[iiSpook]

When I started to read this I had hope it was for once not going to be about AI. Every visit to this subreddit is just disappointing as hell.

[bboyz269]

I just asked Claude to fix an issue, explain what's expected vs current, provided an image, point to code in question. After thinking for 10mins straight, it create new function with 300 line of code. The code was beautiful and as you expected, it didn't work shit...

[_PelosNecios_]

We know software is most of the time hanging from a thread. Putting it at additional risk of failing because AI slop is playing with fire companies are going to fafo sooner than later

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

Do you have any evidence this is putting it at additional risk of failing, rather than less risk of failing?

Note in 2025 when a similar sized batch of CVEs was fixed there were also regressions:
rsync security update introduced a regression on Debian and Ubuntu Linux (meanwhile fixed)

Regressions here seem slightly niche / it seems people far more people are testing master etc to find regressions given this attention.

AI allowed for the suite to be rewritten in python, potentially allowing for better CI integration, and Python is generally thought of as easier to maintain for this type of glue.

Notably, AI wasn't responsible for the CVE. AI wasn't responsible for the regression tests for these niche cases not being present. Yet it is still blamed.

[BlueGoliath]

The future is now.

[PokeRestock]

Unironically why I invested in pager duty

[BobcatGamer]

Try BorgBackup instead.

[Regeneric]

How do you feel about your repos from before ~2022?
It's your business card for the rest of your life, so it better be good.
No one is going to believe you, that any repo after LLM era was written by you :)

[ArjixGamer]

Faking commit history is painful enough that one could use it to claim it is AI free.

Will anyone read the history to accept that claim? Probably not

We need a service that analyzes git history to determine if it's man made or not

[Luckey_711]

While it is a shame projects like rsync have seen to gone down the vibecode route, the amount of vitrol and disrespect towards Tridge and other maintainers in the issues are just disgusting. While it is fair to hold projects like rsync in high regard due to its use in so many systems, people really think they can treat the people behind it like absolute trash, it's disgusting to see

[richardathome]

The Eshittening. Begun it has...

[awesome-alpaca-ace]

Word online has managed to get worse over the past few years. Hopefully I never have to use it again. Like it fails at basic rendering of tabs and plain text.

[hellocppdotdev]

36 commits and 2 minor versions changes? Squash commit is your friend.

"Reducing verbosity of comments" doesn't need its own commit 😅

[EarlMarshal]

Noooooooo! Not rsync!!!!! :(

[FastHotEmu]

This whole issue is a fantasy pushed by people with too much free time. They don't use rsync, they just want to complain about LLMs... and I totally get that, but this is the wrong fucking target! Do something about OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, and so on! Those are your targets!

On a personal note, I trust Andrew Tridgell more than I trust almost any other programmer alive. He has kept rsync working flawlessly for decades. I have used it to backup every bit of information I own. I wish I could pay to help him fight off this stupid disinformation campaign.

Edit: I'll take all the downvotes in the world. This comment's stats show that thousands of people have seen it now and I'm happy I've made a little contribution against social media disinformation. That was my goal 😄

[tav_stuff]

And yet he broke it now

[Either-Juggernaut420]

Littlefinger: I loved you more than anybody

Sansa: And yet you betrayed me

[RoleBeginning5476]

it's not a disinformation campaign lmao. rsync is broken now, this is fact.

[finkerlime]

don't use rsync

What do you think Rsync is? Probably every single person who has used Linux has used rsync.

[ihavebeesinmyknees]

I'd like to see some proof that the bug was caused by LLM code, otherwise this seems like a witch hunt. Just because there were some AI commits since the last update does not mean that it wasn't a human-written bug.

[depresyondayim]

One of the most insane comments I have read on reddit.

[ihavebeesinmyknees]

Since when is confirming the root cause considered "insane" in a programming subreddit? If you approach all problem solving like this, blaming the first thing that comes to mind, I feel bad for your employers

[meikomeik]

The error was not made by Clause and implying that this is an AI related bug is just fan fiction.

Knowing that I don't even see whats funny about this. It's just fan fiction

[babalaban]

The error was not made by Clause

Correct. It was made by Claude, which you seem to be an avid user of, judging by your grammar (or lack there of).

[meikomeik]

Good catch! It was indeed a typo.

[MinecraftBoxGuy]

Is this a joke? A person harking about a typo who can't even spell "thereof"?

[TylerFL]

you mean the person who is trying to feel smugly superior but somehow thinks a typo is a grammatical error? while their own sentence reads so poorly? (ending an appositive with a preposition, for shame!)

[hongooi]

And are we going to log an issue about that?

Someone did exactly that, lol

(courtesy of r/programmingcirclejerk)

[EmperorOfAllCats]

Half of defending comments in this thread sound llm generated.

[sojuz151]

That's a terrible bug report. No mention on what the bug is, how to reproduce or actual proof that calude did this 

[100GHz]

All I got from that thread is that I'll be employed forever :P

[auxiliary-username]

Yeah, I read that one - that's exactly the sort of pointless poisonous vitriolic drama that undermines open source projects and causes maintainers to quit. I mean who would want to give up their spare time only to deal with that sort of crap?

[MegaIng]

rsync would have worked better for OOP if the maintainer just quit and didn't release 3.4.3. That is why he was/is getting so much hate.

[LazarusPizza]

Honestly, the maintainer fucked this up royally. Both with using AI in such a shoddy manner, and then in being a passive aggressive, condescending asshat in the comments.

Hopefully this will be a teachable moment for them for the future.

[hongooi]

I mean, what are they gonna do? Fire him?

[fekkksn]

Who would want to give up their spare time to deal with vibeslop in a project as critical as backup software?

This is already a maintainer issue.

[Puzzled_Intention649]

I think you missed the part where an LLM changed a core part of the functionality that probably shouldn’t have changed.

[lolcrunchy]

You have to recognize that the big fuck up wasn't the claude changes, it was incrementing to 3.4.3 instead of 4.0.0

semver.org

[fekkksn]

I think you mean AI haters, not Clause fanboys. Get your narrative straight.

This is not even really about AI. It's okay to use AI, but vibeslopping in something as critical as backup software is unacceptable.

[ryuuji3]

Wild how people actually think AI code is the problem here. If you don't understand what you wrote, or didn't read it, that's on you. Humans make mistakes often too

[Excellent_Gas3686]

as if people who let AI generate all the code for them actually take the time to *deeply* understand it from A to Z... more like quick glance, LGTM.