Did Claude increase bugs in rsync? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#521

Post by matheusmoreira » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #447

matheusmoreira wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point does it cease to be AI generated and become my own work? If LLM generates some code but I edit it, does it become my own work? How much editing must be done? How large is "largely" ? Exactly how many bits of information must come from my fingers tapping the keyboard in order for me to qualify for authorship? Be precise. If I write something but the LLM polishes it up a bit, is it still my work? Or is it…

Consider the rules around copyright. If your part of it is substantive, then it's your own work. If it isn't, then it isn't. I'm not going to define substantive for you. That's something you should feel obligated to research and learn about yourself; anything less is dishonest.

Copyright provides for works made for hire. You are the author, yet your employer owns it. Your employer owns your output and gets credit for it despite not having written even a single bit of it. You're essentially ghostwriting your employer's software.

So "consider copyright" isn't really strengthening your position.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#522

Post by simianwords » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

ch_fr wrote: post #500

This article is a rant disguised as data analysis. I don't know how to word this in a non-confrontational, respectful way, but this article just feels like ammo for your next "debate with your anti-AI ennemies" where you get to say "look, I proved with data that those people had a disproportionate reaction and have double standards, therefore anyone who dislikes LLMs or their impact are the same!". Like, sorry, I kno…

Strange thing to say. The post does a good job of showing that there is no evidence Claude had anything to do with the regressions.

Your problem is that this was shown? You don't value epistemics -- you care about the ideology more than truth. Even if you don't like AI you should still do it in the right way.

Your comment comes across as more unself aware and more destructive. Lets keep this place truth first and ideology second.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#523

Post by simianwords » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

xmddmx wrote: post #338

There's a meta-level of irony here that's important to note. TFA is defending the use of AI, and it very clearly (to me) used AI to analyze the data and present the results. In doing so, the author used statistics in a way they do not appear to understand, and ended up making numerous false claims (you can see the thread discussing these here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417626 ) In short, the study doesn't…

The meta-meta level irony is that the reaction to this post is based on vibes and misunderstands the point of the article to wage ideological warfare -- much the same way the original github issue was written.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#524

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#525

Post by bwfan123 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

Software is only as healthy as that of the mental-models of its "human" maintainers. This was implicit in the writings of Peter Naur (programming as theory building) and the Fred Brooks (mythical man month) ages ago. AI as a tool can assist just as IDEs and linters have assisted. But eventually the mental models of the human maintainers is the gate and bottleneck. Applying this to rsync, its maintainer would need to foster and grow other human contributors to eventually become maintainers so that the human mental models are carried forward.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#526

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #515

jodrellblank wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “ solid, convincing, extraordinary evidence or argumentation to support that. ” Just ordinary evidence. If there was a charity event which asked for a volunteer to organise drinks, and you volunteered, and then there were no drinks, and you said “I don’t owe you anything stop being entitled, if you want an event with drinks you can fork the idea and organise your own”, people would be unhappy and reasonably so. It’…

That metaphor doesn't operate here. People are building stuff and making it available. Nobody's making a commitment. Nobody's "volunteering" for you.

Explain why the metaphor doesn’t operate here? Bonus points, don’t use the word “entitled”.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#527

Post by rossjudson » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:38 PM UTC

Eufrat wrote: post #327

logicprog wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tridge already explains this: "Like many developers of open source packages I’ve been hit by a flood of security reports lately in my role as the rsync maintainer. Many of those reports are AI generated (not all though, there are some notable ones with very careful and high quality manual analysis). As this flood started to get more intense I realised I needed to raise the defences on rsync a lot — we needed much mor…

I think Tridge is simultaneously trying to be proactive and kinda giving too much credit to marketing. Anthropic has not been able to really give numbers or actual values on what Mythos can really do. It just waved Mythos in front of the public like a boogeyman screaming that AI is going to cause a security nightmare (and it has, but mostly through vibe coded trash from what I’ve noticed); I’m hard pressed to find th…

Yeah, we definitely need to make sure that we take the considerations of the mob into account.

The person owning the project is using the master branch in the way he sees fit.

Incidentally, there is no amount of communicating "correctly" that quells a mob. There's a Venn diagram of concerns, and those with concerns not being met will generate (now infinite) outrage.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#528

Post by rossjudson » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

wolletd wrote: post #453

kelnos wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're willing to step up and be that person, it's not your place for you to suggest it.

I don't agree with that, I can very well still discuss that. He clearly sounds like someone who doesn't want to do this work anymore and should have searched for a successor. That's my impression from that sentence, at least. Don't you agree? So, why didn't he do it? Because just firing up Claude and let it rip is way easier than finding real people and building up trust? Did Claude increase bugs in rsync? Or did Cla…

You're highly critical. What would you be doing differently? So far Tridge has elected to:

- generally decide to fix security issues over preserving compatibility - rewritten an aging test suite in what appears to be a highly responsible way - brought on additional qualified developers to help with the workload

Not bad for a guy who's retired.

You care enough to complain on HN. You could be a part of the solution.

What were you going to do differently, specifically?

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#529

Post by runarberg » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #522

ch_fr wrote: post #500

This article is a rant disguised as data analysis. I don't know how to word this in a non-confrontational, respectful way, but this article just feels like ammo for your next "debate with your anti-AI ennemies" where you get to say "look, I proved with data that those people had a disproportionate reaction and have double standards, therefore anyone who dislikes LLMs or their impact are the same!". Like, sorry, I kno…

Strange thing to say. The post does a good job of showing that there is no evidence Claude had anything to do with the regressions. Your problem is that this was shown? You don't value epistemics -- you care about the ideology more than truth. Even if you don't like AI you should still do it in the right way. Your comment comes across as more unself aware and more destructive. Lets keep this place truth first and ide…

This article merely showed that one particular sample (two releases of rsync) or not statistically significantly different (p > 0.05) on one particular metric (bugs per commit). All that says is that you cannot generalize group difference over the population using that sample.

This still leaves the anecdotal evidence. And anecdotal evidence is still evidence, and in the absence of better evidence, it is perfectly rational to react based on the evidence you do have.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#530

Post by agentultra » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:53 PM UTC

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #513

agentultra wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the commenter you replied to: I think many people in this camp have political or ethical concerns and want to avoid contributing to or supporting the companies behind frontier-AI tools. Or they have moral or technical concerns and want to boycott usage to maintain their principles. It should be fairly widely known at this point.

Obviously people have those concerns. The comment above specifically said: > The value of the Claude attribution is that you can tell at a glance who used AI. Specifies none of that, which is why I was asking the question. > technical concerns Which is exactly why I asked what I did. What technical concerns could possibly exist if the code is good? What does adding that attribution remove or add to technical concerns…

Maybe you want to resist normalizing the use of GenAI for programming?

I know my personal choice doesn’t make much of a difference but I refuse to own a car. I advocate at my local city council to remove car storage from streets, remove parking minimums, add better transit, make the core of our city car-free. It sometimes feels easier to join in and just accept that this is the way of the world but I refuse to believe in inevitability: building cities for the benefit of cars is a choice.

Maybe some folks want to avoid AI code because they don’t want to make that choice?

I can’t say for them. But I do know there’s no sense pretending like they don’t have a point or feigning shock that someone might not have the same view as you do.