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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

#81

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

Quarrel wrote: post #59
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…

> this is a very senior open source contributer who has maintained this project since he came up with the diff algorithm during his Phd

People change. You can be Linus Torvalds for all I care, if one day you wake up and start pushing 9000 line commits created by LLM and with regressions, you're not that person anymore.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#82

Post by mattbee »

baliex wrote: post #43
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.…

I 100% agree with the "please don't fuck up this stable & reliable workhorse" sentiment. I haven't read this in detail but "Six CVEs are fixed in this release. All six are assigned by VulnCheck as CNA. Affected versions are 3.4.2 and earlier in every case." seems like a pretty solid answer to the "why". https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.4.3

But there's been security fixes in most releases of rsync!

Even then, why would a security fix be some kind of strike against AI? We've all seen LLMs being used to tease out the most serious and obscure bugs in C codebases. I'd expect to see a lot of security fixes for an ancient, well-used codebase when an LLM analyses it.

Where is the slop commit here? And why is that commit evidence that tridge has lost his mind to the machine? https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#83

Post by kdjkskdndn »

cinntaile wrote: post #35
vips7L wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t LLMs notorious for just making tests pass and not actually testing functionality?

You have to keep an eye on them, but they don't just make tests pass.

Claude sonnet 4 (this time last year) did do this. It once made simulation if a test script passing. Literally a script that just echoed test names and then said pass.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#84

Post by oytis »

Quarrel wrote: post #59
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…

I'm not sure about tridge personally, but I've regularly seen real competent engineers introduce obvious hallucinations when using coding agents. Review fatigue is real, and you just cannot own the code you didn't write to the same degree as the one you wrote

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#85

Post by JodieBenitez »

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…

> the maintainers seem to have let AI loose on rsync

is it an assumption ?

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#86

Post by teaearlgraycold »

vips7L wrote: post #17
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…

> Like, why? Because everyone, including this forum, is addicted to the instant gratification of LLMs. It’s pure hubris of thinking you can scan the output and it does what you think it does.

TBH I don't really feel the same most of the time. I give the LLM little chunks to do. I read the code. I think. I plan. I write a bit of code. I have the LLM crunch out some bullshit task like setting up an annoying C repo. There aren't that many moments in building with LLMs where things line up so the AI can just absolutely nail some code and save me a ton of time.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#87

Post by ianbutler »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #72

Nobody whose software you use for free owes you anything. It is so important not to lose sight of this. If you feel like they do owe you something, that's only because years of habit -- years of using other people's software for free, and having the good fortune of finding it generally to improve in quality over time -- has caused your baseline to drift from the true state of affairs, which is that nobody whose softw…

People here hate hearing this. You're entirely correct though.

Re: Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

#89

Post by michaelmrose »

This entire post doesn't belong here other than as a cautionary tale.

Don't use other people's issue trackers to editorialize to force them to react to what would otherwise be a tweet

They NEVER proved that they experienced a bug with rsync and if they did experience a bug with rsync they certainly didn't prove that it was caused by AI assistance. This useful research would have required real work.

Their language and methodology of communication is abominable. Lest we forget the "crime" of the developer is providing for free something so useful that it became integral the the users workflow for years then potentially shipping a buggy version. People who labor for free for us deserve our thanks not our contempt.

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