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Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

alexispurslane.github.io

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Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#371

Post by red75prime »

eschaton wrote: post #365
red75prime wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not a hypothetical scenario; I’ve personally encountered a case of someone using an LLM attempt to contribute code I recognized from a specific Open Source project under one license to another project under a different license You say you "recognized code". Does it mean that you weren't able to find the exact match? > an LLM is actually just regurgitating portions of its inputs You seem to be talking about…

I found exact matches. I also found inexact matches, where C functions had been turned into C++ member functions and the like. “Recognized” does not somehow imply a lack of precision. The LLM the person used was trained on a very large corpus of Open Source code, and reproduced that code exactly. Just like LLMs have reproduced chapters of books and articles from the New York Times exactly.

> I found exact matches.

Were those functions trivial? With, say, 1% probability of someone who have not seen them writing them like that?

> Just like LLMs have reproduced chapters of books and articles from the New York Times exactly.

Have you read the articles? As far as I remember they fed large chunks of an article multiple times to an LLM to sometimes get a not-so-long exact match. It can mean that LLMs can infer a style and humans are predictable.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#372

Post by eschaton »

red75prime wrote: post #371
eschaton wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found exact matches. I also found inexact matches, where C functions had been turned into C++ member functions and the like. “Recognized” does not somehow imply a lack of precision. The LLM the person used was trained on a very large corpus of Open Source code, and reproduced that code exactly. Just like LLMs have reproduced chapters of books and articles from the New York Times exactly.

> I found exact matches. Were those functions trivial? With, say, 1% probability of someone who have not seen them writing them like that? > Just like LLMs have reproduced chapters of books and articles from the New York Times exactly. Have you read the articles? As far as I remember they fed large chunks of an article multiple times to an LLM to sometimes get a not-so-long exact match. It can mean that LLMs can infe…

No, the functions weren’t trivial, and a lot of the surrounding code and structure bore substantial similarities as well. If you saw the two files next to each other, you’d assume it was the result of a copy-paste-adjust process if you didn’t know an LLM was involved.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#373

Post by matheusmoreira »

Barrin92 wrote: post #367
matheusmoreira wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghostwriting is a thing.

yes because there's people who can't write but want to pretend that they can, just like the people who don't disclose they're using these tools. If you're the Gwyneth Paltrow of programming you're not making a great case for yourself, and I'd like to know before touching any of the software.

I don't know, am I? Why don't you check out my work and decide for yourself? Better than forming prejudiced opinions about others.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#374

Post by matheusmoreira »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #353
int_19h wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not entitled to know what specific tools were used to produce something, generally speaking. In the absence of such an entitlement, not volunteering to disclose the tools used is not fraud.

Don't think calling a PR written by AI is the same thing as using a "tool". If code is largely generated by AI means that AI was an author and not you with some tool.

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 AI generated?

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#375

Post by infamouscow »

eschaton wrote: post #236
infamouscow wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 polici…

[flagged]

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#376

Post by runarberg »

aarjaneiro wrote: post #366

> "Claude clearly made things worse" &emdash; the main claim Even this report is full of claude-introduced bugs

For those that don’t know the html entity is — not &emdash; although I think in modern codebases people usually just type — directly.

This mistake does exist in the wild though: https://github.com/search?q=%26emdash%3B&type=code

If I was more ambitious I would plot the dates of the blames of these results in a histogram and see if an there is a significant increase in these mistakes (over a baseline —) correlating with the release of some models.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#377

Post by agartner »

Eufrat wrote: post #370
rsc wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting. Tridge doesn't owe anyone anything as far as rsync is concerned. Yet he is spending his time maintaining it, only to be attacked for his efforts. To respond to the specific technical point, there real…

> As a long-time open-source maintainer, I find all the second-guessing and armchair psychoanalysis here (not just in this comment, all over HN) about Tridge's motivations, state of mind, and so on incredibly off-putting. I agree that the entire episode is obscene, but I am also unsure of what to do here either. On some level this is the same problem movie stars run into. I agree that guessing or waxing about the mot…

> the courts don’t care if the license is “as-is”.

There isn't any case law to show that. Certainly not in the age of AI. On the criminal side, the CFAA requires "intentionally causes damage" and that's entirely impossible to prove in the age of AI. On the civil side, liability waivers and warranty disclaimers generally cannot shield intentional or willful misconduct or gross negligence.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#378

Post by ethagnawl »

block_dagger wrote: post #197
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.

At my employer, if AI is not used, it shows up on your performance report and you’ll be told if you don’t start using it, you will be dismissed. I work at a medium sized successful YC-backed SaaS. So here, the attribution is meaningless - they look at your Bedrock and LLM API calls as well as Claude Code history.

> they look at your Bedrock and LLM API calls as well as Claude Code history.

This is fucking insane. How does this correlate with productivity in any way? The results are all that matters, who cares how you got there?

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#379

Post by berti »

delusional wrote: post #253
zzyzxd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never care about AI usage disclosure, because I don't believe that human produced code is necessarily better than AI produced code, unless it's someone I personally know. People need to be responsible for code they commit and push anyways. This has never changed. Whether the code is written by hand, by their cat walking over keyboard, or by AI, is not my concern. A project's code quality can decline for all kinds o…

> People need to be responsible for code they commit and push anyways. Well the GPL (which rsync is licensed under) says: "This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY" so actually nobody is responsible for anything.

I think they meant in terms of karma/reputation for the individual, and the project. Traditionally open source is heavily based on these social currencies.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#380

Post by Barrin92 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #373
Barrin92 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes because there's people who can't write but want to pretend that they can, just like the people who don't disclose they're using these tools. If you're the Gwyneth Paltrow of programming you're not making a great case for yourself, and I'd like to know before touching any of the software.

I don't know, am I? Why don't you check out my work and decide for yourself? Better than forming prejudiced opinions about others.

>Why don't you check out my work and decide for yourself?

because no person can read every line of code written in software they use, or track every commit made to a project. Integrity and authorship matters. If a person lies or obfuscates the origin of what they produce, an article, software, what have you they're doing it for a reason, otherwise they would be honest. That's not prejudice, that's recognizing deceit. And you don't eat fruit from a rotten tree.

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