Live data from Hacker News

Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

github.com

361–370 of 534 posts

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#361
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly what I was calling out. Customers pay money for goods and services. They thus get a bunch of social, ethical, and legal positions in terms of their relationship with the seller. Rsync is an open source project that its maintainers put onto the Internet. People who use it are not customers, and they do not have the right to expectations around how the maintainers will change the software or change how t…

You've never had a customer in your professional setting who didn't pay money for goods and/or services? Yet it was very important for your boss (and therefore you, as a programmer) to service their every whim? Customers are customers. Whether they're paying or not. Not all customers are worth servicing (even with infinite money offered, "firing a customer" is important to keep the community in check). But this isn't…

This is not a professional setting. This is an open source project that somebody published to the internet. Using it does not make you a customer, and it doesn’t matter if it “struck a nerve” with users.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#362

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…

A couple years back, I think I would have bent over backwards to defend the maintainers. It is a gruelling and thankless effort to maintain any open source project, let alone one as established as rsync. I guess I just don't see AI being a net positive anywhere, and I have to see this backlash to using gen AI as a good course correction from the general populous. There are other posts talking about the instant gratif…

[deleted]

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#363

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…

A couple years back, I think I would have bent over backwards to defend the maintainers. It is a gruelling and thankless effort to maintain any open source project, let alone one as established as rsync. I guess I just don't see AI being a net positive anywhere, and I have to see this backlash to using gen AI as a good course correction from the general populous. There are other posts talking about the instant gratif…

That's exactly what it is. It's gambling. Like pulling the arm of a slot machine.

[0] https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116657411750038515

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#364
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autonomous agents are different. Claude should fork the repo because it is a new maintainer trying to take over a project. Doesn't matter if the OG maintainer is under illusions.

There’s so much to unpack here, but let’s say I grant your premises that AIs are equivalent to people and Claude is making its own decisions about the project and the OG maintainer has ceded control of the repo to Mr Claude. I don’t, but let’s assume for a moment. It’s still up to the current maintainer to pick additional or replacement maintainers, and it would be bonkers to expect the new maintainer to fork the rep…

It depends on the circumstances. Maintainers can do whatever they want, theoretically. Practically, there is implicit community involvement, otherwise a project dies as people abandon it. Right now it isn't even acknowledged what is happening.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#365
post #306
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> My guess is people are tired of the "AI is the greatest thing since [cultural reference]" being forced down their throat and grasp at every straw to combat it, which is a sane response in my opinion and should be taken into account. Let's engage in some parallelism then This happens with literally everything in our society. Right now, every single food product seems to be infused with protein. In the past, they've…

> this is just a regression that occurred during regular software development

From a cursory look, it looks like a security fix in response to a CVE surfaced a coding error which (as far as i bothered to check) has been present in the code since 2007.

This is so banal that it's actually hilarious to see people lose their shit over it. But of course nobody is talking about the actual issue but about the _hypothetical potential for issue_ introduced by potential use of AI. It's so meta i don't even know how to make sense of it.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#366
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s so much to unpack here, but let’s say I grant your premises that AIs are equivalent to people and Claude is making its own decisions about the project and the OG maintainer has ceded control of the repo to Mr Claude. I don’t, but let’s assume for a moment. It’s still up to the current maintainer to pick additional or replacement maintainers, and it would be bonkers to expect the new maintainer to fork the rep…

It depends on the circumstances. Maintainers can do whatever they want, theoretically. Practically, there is implicit community involvement, otherwise a project dies as people abandon it. Right now it isn't even acknowledged what is happening.

I think you may be confusing popularity with existence.

The thing that makes a project die is if the maintainers all leave. Users don’t make a project exist. They make it popular.

If the user community all up and left, rsync would still exist and continue as long as its maintainers choose to work on it.

By contrast, if all the maintainers leave because they’re tired of dealing with assholes, the project dies.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#367
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> and grasp at every straw to combat it, which is a sane response Attacking every open source maintainer who might use AI for the sin of having used AI because one hates AI is just abusive behavior, not "sane response". What would the "sane response" be for people tired of the "AI is being forced down my throat and I need to combat it by attacking open source maintainers" side? Grasp at every straw to combat such beh…

> Attacking every open source maintainer who might use AI for the sin of having used AI because one hates AI is just abusive behavior, not "sane response".

That's not what happened, and I think you know it. The number of LOC introduced in the last 2 versions of rsync is off the charts. And there are bugs. I've been in a situation like the author of that issue. Upgrade a package and things fall apart and it would be very, very expensive to debug it to file the appropriate bug reports... so I roll back to a known good version.

Yes, the language the person used wasn't the greatest.

IMO, this is a litmus test for how you feel about AI. For the people that hate it, it's just a big pile on and "I told you so" ... we don't have enough info about the author to know if they are anti-AI. We know they are against using AI in a BAD WAY.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. When someone does that, he gets rightfully called out. On the other side, accusations of being Russian trol are pretty common, even here on HN. Why are people more sensitive to antisemitism than to antislavism? Double standards, or just a hate induced by decades / centuries of indoctrination?

> Why are people more sensitive to antisemitism than to antislavism? Calling someone a vatnik or Russian troll is mostly because the statement that provokes such a callout reproduces Russian propaganda talking points, and Russia has been running propaganda campaigns for well over a decade now. Similarly, ordinary Russians aren't called orcs, but Russian soldiers are called that because of their despicable behavior in…

Replace Russia with Israel and everything you said also applies.

That's not an answer to the question you quoted.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#369
post #36

I truly don't get it You have a rock solid piece of software used by an infinite amount of people and other services. It works fine, does it's job and just have some time to time updates due to minor bug fixes. Why do we need AI here? And more over, why people is saying "fork it and use the previous version". It should be actually all the way around, create a parallel fork younamethetool-ai and keep the OG untouched.…

Why do we need any tools at all? Software worked perfectly fine when people were editing code with `ed`, so I'm going to go open timewasting issues complaining about FOSS devs using an IDE.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#370
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never had a customer in your professional setting who didn't pay money for goods and/or services? Yet it was very important for your boss (and therefore you, as a programmer) to service their every whim? Customers are customers. Whether they're paying or not. Not all customers are worth servicing (even with infinite money offered, "firing a customer" is important to keep the community in check). But this isn't…

This is not a professional setting. This is an open source project that somebody published to the internet. Using it does not make you a customer, and it doesn’t matter if it “struck a nerve” with users.

Well in my professional setting, I deal with non-paying customers all the time. They're still customers and I'm still expected to listen to them.

It was better when a dedicated PM was shielding me from this crap but here we are. Deciding who and who not to listen to is just part of project management.

Post reply on HN