What's the difference between experience a human made bug versus an AI made bug in software?
Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
41–50 of 86 posts
Re: Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
#42Looks fine? most of the commits are tests, ci, docs and issues that could cause memory corruption / hidden bugs rather than any new feature development. Of course it's unfortunate that it caused this bug to surface and it would be curious to investigate exactly why this happened, maybe the "safe" c operations have different (unexpected) behavior instead of immediately pointing out that "ai bad". I think patching issu…
> Everyone is still learning how and how much AI should be used and we shouldn't be too harsh on opensource developers. The main problem with using AI in open source software is that millions of people rely on your code, but you risk exposing them all to something unverified.
Yes, you risk reputation and still need to be careful. One way to try to mitigate is to write tests. Which is what rsync project is doing, too. But there's only so much you can catch alone.
And BTW, you're not distributing to millions of people as an author of the code.
There are distributions maintainers between you and the world, which can also intervene, and are responsible for what they distribute, build testing on many configurations/architectures/versions - and can decide to revert to protect users, etc. And often do.
FOSS authors themselves can't be expected to keep around outdated systems from 5 years ago just to test build compatibility, in 8 different architectures that someone may want to build their code with.
Very few projects have as comprehensive testsuite as say sqlite. You can never cover everyting, so the beauty of FOSS is that someone will come and tell you and send you a fix for their special system, and now everything is again fine for that one special person, or distro maintainer.
Re: Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
#43The first actually constructive attempt of figuring out the root cause can be found in this issue: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/897
Re: Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
#44I saw an exceptionally long and thoughtful post on Mastodon from "Space Hobo" https://teh.entar.net/@spacehobo that definitely deserves reprinting here ----- I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when…
> If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.
> That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.
I disagree. The amount of commits is not from somebody who is carefully reviewing the new code and considering the changes done. It's from somebody who thinks they are in control and think they can guardrail the AI.
I've seen this at work as well. Maybe it's a small case of the braineater that so many tech bros get when they get older. But they talk about the AI as if it were a being that can be reasoned with and not that it's just a statistical interpolator and autocompleter.
I know when I'm vibe coding. Just last week I needed 5 colors for a green to read gradient for visualisation some states. I ended up with a script that outputs arbitray color gradients in 5 different colorspaces (including a colorspace for which AFAIK there's no support in Ruby as of now) and additionally also considers different color vision deficiencies.
Is it useful? Yes. Would I run this code in production? Hell no.
Re: Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
#45What's the difference between experience a human made bug versus an AI made bug in software?
A human preserves more context and might remember what they did and when pointing out a new bug, they often have an idea what's wrong.
Re: Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
#46This is a problem of insufficient checking happening in-between a PR being made, and it being committed. Imagine you have a low quality coder in your coders, they produce a lot of code, but while some of it is fine, some of it is... dubious. That is no different from an AI and the way you deal with it is the same. You check the PR before committing it. To allow PRs from them (or anyone really) to get merged without p…
The commits were all from the original inventor of rsync.
Not a low quality newbie coder.
Re: Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
#47Maybe he got notified from the mythos team of a bunch of vulnerabilities and then followed up using claude. Doesn't seem that unlikely. What would you do if suddenly there were a dozen exploitable CVEs in your highly used open source project staring you down? Maybe you'd use the tool that found them to patch them as quickly as possible.
I am absolutely willing to give tridge the benefit of the doubt here, but a note on what you said: I don't think you should ever patch a CVE "as quickly as possible". You should do it slowly, be very sure of the change, and test the hell out of it. You can easily introduce a new security vulnerability by rushing something like that.
Good point. I just can't imagine the urgency and pressure I'd feel.
Re: Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
#48I reckon we will soon see a growing movement of maintainers forking popular open-source projects to the point before vibecoding was introduced to the development process.
I can definitely see myself supporting this. Vibecoding promotes the uncontrollable growth of features, and thus bugs, when the vast majority of software benefits from stability. It should be possible to be done with development, barring security patches and bug fixes.
Re: Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
#49It's rather ironic that in profit making enterprises using AI are not only encouraged but also part of KPIs. But in open source it's scourge
Pride in one'one's journey, the feeling of accomplishment for creating/learning/doing something, and the general art within the act...
Yes, it's ironic that the stock photo companies offer on-demand image generation when the private galleries only offer photos which required an adventure and effort.
Re: Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation needed :) That's a bold claim. May be true, but it's a bold one, so something backing it up would be nice.
Could one not simply look at the github to verify it with their own eyes? One of git's defining features is every commit being accountable
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