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Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

alexispurslane.github.io

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Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#231

Post by hparadiz »

OptionOfT wrote: post #111
aesthesia wrote: post #95

I don't have a dog in this fight, but a few points that look a little suspicious: - The release with the highest number of attributed bugs is the release _right before_ the first release with Claude-coauthored commits, released in January; is there a chance that unattributed LLM-authored commits made it into this release? - The release attribution methodology is not great, since it will tend to attribute bugs introdu…

You can use LLMs in multiple ways, from very hands on to make local changes to completely hands-off. I've seen plenty of code that was LLM generated but the commit message itself did not have the co-author attached to it. This only seems to happen when someone's interface to the codebase is completely though Claude/Codex/..., and those are usually the most verbose commits, and yet they say the least, because they jus…

I would expect a mature code base like rsync to have a lot of unit tests and integration tests and frankly if there's not enough that such bugs haven't been caught; that should be your first use of LLMs in order to setup some deterministic guidelines when you do start making changes to your actual code.

I have been experimenting with both aforementioned styles with interesting results.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#232

Post by eschaton »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #229
eschaton wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. Unfortunately, a large number of people are being told—and here, you can see many who believe it—that the output of an LLM either carries no copyright or is copyright by the one prompting it. In other words, even right here on Hacker News it’s widely believed that LLMs “launder” copyright.

Irrelevant either way. It's your name on the commit, and the code either infringes or it does not. Whether an LLM was used is immaterial.

Not irrelevant. A large number of people who would not copy and paste code from one project to the another will attempt to contribute the copyright-infringing output of an LLM and not think twice.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#233

Post by eschaton »

potsandpans wrote: post #230
eschaton wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fortune 10 company that I spent decades at and retired from just a couple years ago noticed this issue immediately and issued a blanket ban on the use of these tools for the company’s own code that to my knowledge has not been rescinded. (They also started developing their own coding-specific LLM, training solely on code they owned, around the same time.) You might consider that there is a very large incentive by…

[flagged]

Or you’re misinformed about what my old employer is actually doing, or how they’re doing it.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#234

Post by GodelNumbering »

Was just looking at commits and came across a commit and its revert

original commit: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/d046525de39315d...

```

- if (!ptr)

- ptr = malloc(num * size);

- else if (ptr == do_calloc)

+ if (!ptr || ptr == do_calloc)

   ptr = calloc(num, size);
```

Written with claude. This is a good example of what slips through LLM attention. It forces all allocations to be calloc as if it is a strict upgrade. For large and recursive allocations, this becomes a significant cost.

reverted in https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/7db73ad9a1b8721...

if you read the description of revert half carefully, it's easy to tell that even that was written by an LLM .

I can understand the sentiment of whoever posted the original thread.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#235

Post by infamouscow »

eschaton wrote: post #198
thorum wrote: post #80

Unfortunately for the people mad about this, I predict the only thing they will accomplish by pressuring the rsync maintainers, is to discourage everyone else from responsibly disclosing their use of AI. You’re just going to make people disable Claude attribution on their commits to avoid drama.

“Don’t get mad at people for doing something unethical or immoral, or they’ll do something unethical or immoral!” Disabling attribution of LLM-generated code is fraud, because you’re saying you wrote the code. Of course that fits right in with the use of an LLM to generate code in the first place, since what it’s actually doing is regurgitating its inputs stripped of any license and copyright notice.

It's only fraud if a person signed their name stating such.

Their name being attached to the commit is itself, irrelevant, as their is no way to submit a patch otherwise. You could use a fake name, but you're just moving this fraud problem around.

You're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that using a tool constitutes fraud. Frankly, it's silly, if not genuinely stupid.

Film photographers in the early 2000s routinely called digital "not real photography" and Photoshop "cheating" because you could delete bad shots and fix everything later. Traditional musicians and critics dismissed drum machines, synthesizers, and autotune as soulless tools.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#236

Post by eschaton »

infamouscow wrote: post #235
eschaton wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Don’t get mad at people for doing something unethical or immoral, or they’ll do something unethical or immoral!” Disabling attribution of LLM-generated code is fraud, because you’re saying you wrote the code. Of course that fits right in with the use of an LLM to generate code in the first place, since what it’s actually doing is regurgitating its inputs stripped of any license and copyright notice.

It's only fraud if a person signed their name stating such. Their name being attached to the commit is itself, irrelevant, as their is no way to submit a patch otherwise. You could use a fake name, but you're just moving this fraud problem around. You're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that using a tool constitutes fraud. Frankly, it's silly, if not genuinely stupid. Film photographers in the early 2000s…

Intent and custom both matter quite a bit in law. It is customary to treat the name attached to a commit as the copyright holder of any changes represented by that commit, just as it was for the sender of an email containing a patch back when that was how such work was done.

Often this is also spelled out in a project’s contribution guidelines, and some projects have even had more explicit copyright assignment policies they required contributors to agree to, but the lack of such guidelines or assignment policies does not mean the custom as normally observed in the field is irrelevant.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#237

Post by jhack »

eschaton wrote: post #198
thorum wrote: post #80

Unfortunately for the people mad about this, I predict the only thing they will accomplish by pressuring the rsync maintainers, is to discourage everyone else from responsibly disclosing their use of AI. You’re just going to make people disable Claude attribution on their commits to avoid drama.

“Don’t get mad at people for doing something unethical or immoral, or they’ll do something unethical or immoral!” Disabling attribution of LLM-generated code is fraud, because you’re saying you wrote the code. Of course that fits right in with the use of an LLM to generate code in the first place, since what it’s actually doing is regurgitating its inputs stripped of any license and copyright notice.

"Disabling attribution of LLM-generated code is fraud, because you’re saying you wrote the code."

Should there by attribution for Google or Stack Overflow copy/paste? Who should we bully about this?

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#238

Post by cyanydeez »

hparadiz wrote: post #231
OptionOfT wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use LLMs in multiple ways, from very hands on to make local changes to completely hands-off. I've seen plenty of code that was LLM generated but the commit message itself did not have the co-author attached to it. This only seems to happen when someone's interface to the codebase is completely though Claude/Codex/..., and those are usually the most verbose commits, and yet they say the least, because they jus…

I would expect a mature code base like rsync to have a lot of unit tests and integration tests and frankly if there's not enough that such bugs haven't been caught; that should be your first use of LLMs in order to setup some deterministic guidelines when you do start making changes to your actual code. I have been experimenting with both aforementioned styles with interesting results.

I've had a local LLM spending weeks trying to write tests. then debug those tests. then write antipatterns and patterns for those tests.

It's amusing. It's not terrible, but tests arn't going to save you from a malicious tester.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#239

Post by toofy »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #143
Aurornis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of the Claude attribution is that you can tell at a glance who used AI. I don't care about the advertising angle. We all know Claude by now. I want some indicator that AI was used.

And why do you want to know that? So you can call our projects slop? Ostracize us?

for the same reason we want to know who wrote an article, a book, a movie, a song, a play, a journal paper, a painting, and on and on.

why do you so many people want to hide who the real author is?

we should be very weary of anyone claiming they’re the author of something when they’re absolutely not. if jon wrote a book and i take credit, that’s shady as hell.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#240

Post by eschaton »

jhack wrote: post #237
eschaton wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Don’t get mad at people for doing something unethical or immoral, or they’ll do something unethical or immoral!” Disabling attribution of LLM-generated code is fraud, because you’re saying you wrote the code. Of course that fits right in with the use of an LLM to generate code in the first place, since what it’s actually doing is regurgitating its inputs stripped of any license and copyright notice.

"Disabling attribution of LLM-generated code is fraud, because you’re saying you wrote the code." Should there by attribution for Google or Stack Overflow copy/paste? Who should we bully about this?

Yes, in fact, this is why people who do that are looked down upon.

They are in fact committing fraud if they do not attribute the code in their commit properly, because by committing it they’re claiming to have rights by virtue of authorship that they do not have. (Namely, the right to contribute that code to the project,.) They may also be committing copyright infringement, depending on the copyright and license status of some code they found via Google or Stack Overflow.

It’s always fascinating to me to see how many people on Hacker News have such extremely poor understanding of how intellectual property actually works, and how misrepresenting themselves or their work can actually have consequences.

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