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Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

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Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#55

Post by Hendrikto »

vsgherzi wrote: post #31

I also hate the ai slop but on the flip slide this maintainer has been asking for help for years and dosent receive much in the discord. I also want quality code but don’t jump to demonize a volunteer especially when not many have jumped in to help

Did he ask for help in churning all the code for no reason? Rsync was complete software. It does not need features, it needs stability and merely maintenance.

If the author used AI for small, well-reviewed maintenance changes, that would be okay. But instead he is making large and sweeping changes that are entirely uncalled for and cause breakage.

If the maintainer is overworked, that is even more reason not to do this.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#57

Post by ornornor »

z3t4 wrote: post #30

Few things can trigger me more then finding a bug/regression and when tracking it down the commit reads like "modernizing the code", replacing all var with let, etc.

Uhhh why? Aren’t these worthy goals? I’ve worked on software where the motto was “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and they paid me quite a bit of money to update from distributions, runtimes, and libraries that were EOL for 5–10 years already. I’d argue that keeping up loosely with modern practices of much easier than running outdated everything and suffer the consequences (breaches, painful updates)

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#58

Post by akoboldfrying »

GalaxyNova wrote: post #52

What's next? Vibe coded coreutils?

Funny you should say that. The latest Ubuntu reimplemented coreutils in Rust, introducing a bunch of TOCTOU bugs.

TTBOMK the reimplementation was done by humans, but the overall principle still applies I think.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#59

Post by Quarrel »

koehler wrote: 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.…

wtf is this comment section?

The author of these commits were tridge & claude.

What does tridge have to do to convince the open source community that he might be a legit programmer & have a clue?

Samba? Whats that? Rsync? Never heard of it. Tivo? No clue (maybe more Australian context here than others, but still).

Even the comments on the github issue, are totally devoid of the context that this is a very senior open source contributer who has maintained this project since he came up with the diff algorithm during his Phd, started the project and now chooses to acknowledge that he's using claude.

Is there any evidence that the bug rate on rsync is any worse than it used to be? or just a screenshot from mastadon?

It is just so bizarre to me.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#60

Post by dannersy »

theonemind wrote: post #14

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 gratification of LLM use and the more I have to interact with people using the tools, I think this may truly be the problem. Our biology can't handle it. I see otherwise very smart people do really really stupid things because the slot machine told them, but it has even trained them to be helpless when the slot machine fails them.

I'm being seen as a Luddite, blind to the advancement, and then I see colleagues writing benchmarks that make no sense but have beautiful graphs made with AI. Then I basically have to choose to smile at them and pretend it's good work or scold them for not seeing that the bench is testing an interval baked in as a constant so it's moot. Both options are treating them like they are 7 years old, not intelligent colleagues.

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