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Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

alexispurslane.github.io

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Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#391

Post by Daishiman »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #175
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.

I'd be willing to be that an undisclosed LLM disclosure will follow a developer around for the rest of their career

I'm willing to be that in two years that's going to be completely irrelevant because the amount of code written by hand will drop to less than 10%.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#392

Post by ex-aws-dude »

dang wrote: post #361
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342705 People opening issues just to rant against an open source project is acceptable content for HN? How is that even allowed in the first place without getting flagged/removed? And every time that happens the project gets brigaded from HN users

People have been ranting for, against, and about open source projects since open source began. Please follow the site guidelines from now on.

This ain’t a rant it’s literally a screenshot of a mastodon tweet posted on an issue page

How does low effort rage-bait spark curiosity?

The comment to upvote ratio clearly shows it’s inflammatory

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#393

Post by whateveracct »

wolletd wrote: post #246
GodelNumbering wrote: post #234

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 str…

Also the amount of commits is suspicious. In the last two months, rsync had about as much commits as in the last two years before that. Most of them written with claude. And then stuff like this is in there. That's exactly what I'd expect when someone is excited about AI usage and becomes... well, sloppy.

mythical man month only gets more prescient as time passes

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#394

Post by Daishiman »

CapsAdmin wrote: post #344
nomel wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always noticed, within any subject involving tools, there are people who like the tools, and some people who like to use the tools to do something else. With programming, I've always been in the later: it's a tool that allows me to do what I actually love, which is problem solving, system level thinking , and providing some nice solution to that problem, that happens to be through software. So, I have an absolut…

I'm not anti-AI but something I've been thinking about is the discipline it requires. As you said, it's a tool that allows you to rename a variable name on one end and do complete vibe coding on the other end. Developers may say that we should stay somewhere left on that spectrum, because that's where human's are more involved. But developers also say good practices should be followed when talking to each other, and…

> It requires discipline, which varies a lot between developers, between projects, current mood, and so on.

In the beginning you might be careful doing small changes, but after a while you might get more tempted to accept the output for what it is, because ultimately that's much easier.

Counterpoint: how is this any different from how things were pre-LLMs? I have seen, in the same codebase, some throughly well-written and tested PRs that read like Shakespeare and some of the laziest slop that even no LLM would ever write because humans have an unlimited capacity for laziness.

You catch the bad stuff through oversight, process, automated and manual checks, and the ultimate threat that your job depends on your ability to deliver so you better allocate at least enough energy into this so that you can ship moderately working code.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#395

Post by Daishiman »

yw3410 wrote: post #278
nomel wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always noticed, within any subject involving tools, there are people who like the tools, and some people who like to use the tools to do something else. With programming, I've always been in the later: it's a tool that allows me to do what I actually love, which is problem solving, system level thinking , and providing some nice solution to that problem, that happens to be through software. So, I have an absolut…

I am anti-vibe coding if that meets your criteria? Reviewing vibe-coded PRs and features has been utterly exhausting over the past few months. I work on critical, mature software - a small change in behaviour can mean data loss or non-compliance with regulations for our customers. The biggest problem with AI PRs is the sheer amount of churn, extra code and lack of intent with the PRs it generates. The only way I can…

> The biggest problem with AI PRs is the sheer amount of churn, extra code and lack of intent with the PRs it generates.

But this isn't an LLM problem; this is a problem of undisciplined engineers who feel they need to cram extra stuff in a PR. If an engineer doesn't look at the output of the LLM and generate extra work then it's still on them, right?

> The only way I can describe the latter is that an AI-only PR feels to me like a painting where everything is high detail - and you have to comb over each part before you understand why it's there because so much is superfluous

This just indicates that the engineer doesn't know how to use the tool. Hell they can ask the LLM to split the work into focused PRs and Claude will be happy to do it and the results might no even be half bad.

> Also when I'm _using_ the agent; at least 50 percent of my time is spent telling it to stop with it's approach so it doesn't go down a useless rabbit hole and waste tokens.

If this is happening often then the tool is probably not fit for the job.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#397

Post by Eufrat »

tptacek wrote: post #387
kelipso wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the maintainers don’t owe users nothing is a disgusting sentiment that doesn’t stand real scrutiny. There is a social contract here. If you want to be respected and get recognized as “tridge” or whatever your name is, you owe the people that recognize you and that wider community in general.

No there isn't.

I just cannot understand this logic, can you explain why there is no responsibility whatsoever on the part of a maintainer towards the users?

Selling a toaster has an implicit warranty of merchantability. Society expects that if you sell me something, it should have certain promises. Yes, there’s no monetary exchange here, the work is given gratis, but there’s still a relationship and an interaction here and I think it is clear some people, like myself, believe that there are implied expectations. Just because it is “free” doesn’t mean it allows one to have a seemingly psychopathic attitude on the matter. It doesn’t absolve people of societal obligations.

I read that article by Mike McQuaid and I don’t get the impression that, “Yes, project maintainers should be allowed to run projects as they see fit and they put up with a lot of drive-by insults and hostile users. You don’t understand how hard all of this is and I’m doing it for free.” I get, “I hate my users and you should be grateful that I give you anything.”

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#398

Post by rakel_rakel »

rsc wrote: post #354
Eufrat wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I agree, it's very off-putting, and I totally understand that the amount of reports are overwhelming for maintainers of popular libraries.

> More reports means more fixes means more code changes means more bugs.

Sounds like we'll be riding a downward spiral for the foreseeable future? It will be very interesting to see how stats like the ones you shared develop in the coming year(s).

From the article I find this a bit concerning:

> So: the Claude releases changed way more lines of code than historical ones, but didn't have more bugs. More code, same bugs. That's not what you'd expect if Claude were making things worse.

More code, same bugs, is a net negative, no? I mean unless it's strictly needed for the inherent complexity of the program. But I've seen a tokenizer written by Rob Pike and I've seen a tokenizer written by Claude.... they are not the same :D

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#399

Post by classified »

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…

AI is so much like a religion. There is nothing you can say to a believer that will make them question their believes. Or more generally, you cannot reason anyone out of something that they want to believe.

Re: Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

#400

Post by mikemcquaid »

Eufrat wrote: post #397
tptacek wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No there isn't.

I just cannot understand this logic, can you explain why there is no responsibility whatsoever on the part of a maintainer towards the users? Selling a toaster has an implicit warranty of merchantability. Society expects that if you sell me something, it should have certain promises. Yes, there’s no monetary exchange here, the work is given gratis, but there’s still a relationship and an interaction here and I think…

If I hated my users I wouldn’t work on Homebrew for 17 years. I do hate a small subset of hostile users.

The selling metaphor doesn’t work. Homebrew is not sold and its license, effectively a EULA, discloses all warranties because it is not sold and we are not paid a wage to build it.

I have also built a bunch of proprietary software for money where my obligations are different. I also enjoy that and my responsibilities differ there.

Users should be grateful that they are given anything. We do not get anything from their use. For the vast majority, it is a one way relationship (contributors excluded of course).

If they don’t like the choices made by me or the project: they can fork it. They won’t, though, because the closest friend of entitlement is laziness. They can use Nix or MacPorts instead which may be a better fit for them and, if they are not contributing, does not disadvantage Homebrew.

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