> Is there any evidence that the bug rate on rsync is any worse than it used to be? or just a screenshot from mastadon? There's plenty of evidence that rsync 3.4.3 has broken a bunch of features like incremental copies, yes. Which is why your post is a great proof of how AI derangement can make previously great engineers output broken dangerous slop.
Has rsync never broken features before, without AI?
I don't remember of any examples, no. I'm sure you can use your clanker to answer that though and also plot out the number of occurences.
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.
Seems like that it's not that coding agents are to blame, its that the people who are ultimately responsible for committing and merging the offending code are to blame, regardless of its origin.
Or no one is to blame, if the mechanism of the regression is complex and non-obvious based just on the patch itself.
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 thi…
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.
Similarly, a few years ago, I would've never expected "my magic code generation machine is doing all my work for me now, I don't even bother looking at what it does anymore!" to reach the Hacker News home page on a regular basis, either, yet here we are. Irrational actions lead to irrational reactions.
That’s not how LLMs are used by experienced engineers.
And yet this is exactly how it was used for rsync which caused the outrage you're all complaining about.
You're being dishonest with what you wrote when the proof is literally in this article.
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.
Just because you got shat on the head once it doesn't mean it's fine to be shat on the head every day now.
> Why do we need AI here? AI psychosis is a real thing and an actual mental health issue.
Similar to anti-AI derangement
You might want to use different term. After all, Trump derangement syndrome turned out to be "people who actually listen to him and say truth about him".
X-derangement thing is not used in reference to people whobare wrong or lying, but in reference to people who are making correct observations
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 thi…
> I think this behavior is very silly and people are just trying to justify their hate to AI by latching onto every possible thing It's not silly to have issues with something. People act on their issues. Possibly not the issue underlying the commit at hand here but something else, and act on it which makes it something to consider. My guess is people are tired of the "AI is the greatest thing since [cultural referen…
> It's not silly to have issues with something.
Note this is not what OP called silly. It's possible to take legitimate issue with something, then act silly about it. People are free to their opinions but not necessarily to (as an extreme example) write their opinions on the wall with their excrement. Regardless of any veracity behind the opinion, some decorum is expected in its expression. (I guess unless one is explicitly doing away with decorum but that's when violence takes its place.)
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.
Uhhh why? Aren’t these worthy goals? I’ve worked on software where the motto was “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and they paid me quite a bit of money to update from distributions, runtimes, and libraries that were EOL for 5–10 years already. I’d argue that keeping up loosely with modern practices of much easier than running outdated everything and suffer the consequences (breaches, painful updates)
What hurts the most is that most ppl disagree with me. It's like people telling you they will paint your house for free, even though the color of your house is perfectly fine, you agree to paint it in another color. Then you come home to find that they have bored a bunch of holes in the facade and tells you it's the new industry standard, when the winter comes you will have to plug these holes with special plugs, and you wake up next morning and it's -10 C outside. Your house is now pink, you are cold, and nothing has improved. Next week another team comes by and offers to repaint your house for free... They say orange is the new pink.