63 pointsby justdotJSan hour ago6 comments
  • theonemind17 minutes ago
    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 about the primitive human minds not being able to accept paradise. You wrote the perfect tool, you won, almost undisplaceable in a niche, reliable, a metaphorical household name. It makes no sense to anyone to gamble or mess with that, it's just mind boggling.

    And that's still a damn obnoxious thing to do in the formal issue tracker. Bad attitude, bad faith.

    • roenxi11 minutes ago
      Are you basing this opinion on the issue or actual evidence? Because this github link, although interesting, is almost completely context free on what the drama is beyond "Claude". The rsync maintainers could be anywhere on the spectrum from the perfect and responsible maintainer to incompetent children and we couldn't really tell.
    • vips7L10 minutes ago
      > 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.

  • rsyringan hour ago
    > 26k code changes in 2 months..... rsync was 67k LOC as of 236417c (latest not obviously vibecoded commit it seems?).[1]

    Wow.

    1: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929#issuecommen...

    • scared_togetheran hour ago
      When I look at the commits themselves, most of the ones generated by Claude are testsuite changes, or at least labelled as such.

      https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/

      • vips7L2 minutes ago
        Aren’t LLMs notorious for just making tests pass and not actually testing functionality?
      • shimman23 minutes ago
        Is that suppose to make this better? IME the most valuable tests are those that test specific regressions. It's the scaffolding we build for ourselves to enable feature development. Remove that scaffolding and you get accidents. Pray to your god of choice these accidents don't cause harm or loss of life.

        It should really be considered negligence at this point. Some of this software is extremely valuable, it's how we flourish as humans. Purposely fucking with that should bear some real world consequence. We do the same in every other industry, software is just as important too.

  • krackers42 minutes ago
    Hm good timing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334854 (OpenRsync)
  • freakynitan hour ago
    The comments are worth reading.
    • akerl_41 minutes ago
      Are they? I've read them and they mostly just made me feel like shit.

      The amount of drive-by hate being thrown at project maintainers of an open source project is depressing.

      • asp_hornet24 minutes ago
        I guess both things can be true. Make you feel horrible and the reality of open source sometimes.
    • cpard21 minutes ago
      The comments are definitely not worth reading. It’s a very sad thread, you literally had to go through all of them to find one that wasn’t about hate and stating some facts about the issues of the code.
      • wjnc8 minutes ago
        I found them worth reading for the following set of thoughts came up:

        - programmers had problems with delivering quality long before LLM’s

        - very much research and tools went into that, bringing us {Git, libraries, VSCode, reviews, …,} but the human factor stayed the same (and more pronounced imho than in other fields of engineering)

        - LLMs democratized programming, enhancing a few, dropping the bottom to no skill programming

        - the tools and practices created for the quality problems from the past turn out to be wholly incapable of maintaining quality in the present

        The main problem behind this is that those delivering the QA tools of the past are central in the AI race. Old school engineering would separate these concerns.

    • butterlesstoast14 minutes ago
      The bread shop analogy made my year
    • drdrey23 minutes ago
      Counterpoint: don't read the comments
  • magarniclean hour ago
    Aww, but I have such big plans for it!
  • dnnddidiejan hour ago
    Terrible issue. If I maintained I would instaclose. Must be bad for maintainers stress levels.