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?<p>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.<p>And that's still a damn obnoxious thing to do in the formal issue tracker. Bad attitude, bad faith.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Doesn't matter if they did it by hand or with AI.
> Like, why?<p>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.
> 26k code changes in 2 months..... rsync was 67k LOC as of 236417c (latest not obviously vibecoded commit it seems?).[1]<p>Wow.<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecomment-4585065320" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen...</a>
When I look at the commits themselves, most of the ones generated by Claude are testsuite changes, or at least labelled as such.<p><a href="https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/</a>
Aren’t LLMs notorious for just making tests pass and not actually testing functionality?
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.<p>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.
In my perspective, "Analyze code, come up with edge cases and gaps and create unit tests for them" is one of the use-cases where AI was starting to get really good at, so I can see why someone would want to extend their test-suite dramatically using it.<p>But yes, using AI to then generate code that still causes regressions doesn't quite square with that. Given the huge amount of test-changes I'd still assume good faith by the maintainer; possibly just a bit of overexcitement paired with a dash of too much confidence into the new tools that is now hitting reality.
Hm good timing with <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334854">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334854</a> (OpenRsync)
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.
The comments are worth reading.
Are they? I've read them and they mostly just made me feel like shit.<p>The amount of drive-by hate being thrown at project maintainers of an open source project is depressing.
The comments are definitely not worth reading. It’s a very sad thread, you literally had to go through all of them to find one that wasn’t about hate and stating some facts about the issues of the code.
I found them worth reading for the following set of thoughts came up:<p>- programmers had problems with delivering quality long before LLM’s<p>- very much research and tools went into that, bringing us {Git, libraries, VSCode, reviews, …,} but the human factor stayed the same (and more pronounced imho than in other fields of engineering)<p>- LLMs democratized programming, enhancing a few, dropping the bottom to no skill programming<p>- the tools and practices created for the quality problems from the past turn out to be wholly incapable of maintaining quality in the present<p>The main problem behind this is that those delivering the QA tools of the past are central in the AI race. Old school engineering would separate these concerns.
The bread shop analogy made my year
People are saying they detect a lot of "hate" in these comments which I don't see or agree with at all. People clearly have negative opinions about this and they're expressing them rather openly but to confuse this with actual "personal hate" seems like an equally overcharged response.<p>When you do anything publicly, even something that's considered a 'public good' like contributing to open source, you are opening yourself to the full tide of humanity for better or for worse. The overwhelming majority of the time it's for the better, occasionally, and in response to unpopular decisions, it's for worse.<p>What you shouldn't do is take any of this personally. It's open source. You have permission to take a break, you have permission to directly ignore issues and users, you have permission to do whatever makes _you_ happy.<p>If your goal is to receive unremitting love and adoration from a crowd of strangers then you're going to be bitterly disappointed... no matter how you occupy yourself.
Counterpoint: don't read the comments
Aww, but I have such big plans for it!
Terrible issue. If I maintained I would instaclose. Must be bad for maintainers stress levels.
If I were a user, knowing that the maintainers just let Claude lose on rsync would be bad for my stress levels.<p>In any case, I hate rsync owing to how easy it is to accidentally deleting everything. From my pov I don't care if it disappears.