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Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

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251–260 of 534 posts

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#251
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spamming an open source developer with angry comments because they decided to use a new tool for the code they write and publish freely is not normal.

This is rsync we are talking about. A bug in rsync basically means lost data and/or unreliable backups. I think it's normal to be pissed at lost data. Maybe it's not socially acceptable to spit in the face of a volunteer but it's 100% human to feel annoyed by an obvious drop in code quality.

> Maybe it's not socially acceptable to spit in the face of a volunteer

Why are you hedging this? Do you think maybe it is socially acceptable?

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#252

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.

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

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bugs are bugs and need fixing. How dense can people get.

Regressions are bad and need to not happen.

Regressions are bad and they should be avoided. Still, software engineering is a complex thing and regressions happened long time before coding agents were a thing. Unless one can pinpoint regression to changes that were more sloppy than the human-written rsync commits were I don't think coding agents are to blame.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#255
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.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#256

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.

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 f…

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.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#257

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…

[flagged]

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#259

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 softw…

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

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.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#260

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.

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.

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