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Comment by happymellon | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a mixed one here.

The vibe coding got the project attention and it looks like he's going to get the help he needed.

However the "outrage", if you even call it that, wasn't entirely misplaced when pretty basic bugs were introduced by this, such as:

Can't use rsync with absolute paths:

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/922

Links mode is broken:

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/915

The scale of the commits, and rewriting the entire testing framework was pretty big for a "bugfix" revision.

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It is entirely misplaced based on the evidence so far.

Neither of the bugs you link are currently traced back to a commit that used AI.

But this one can: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/905 was caused by https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/4fa7156ccdb2ad3... and I find it pretty absurd.

I don’t think AI assisted code is bad, but I really question tridge’s approach here. His post in response to to the dogpiling isn’t good (https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0). I appreciate his sense of duty to maintain rsync, but I get the very strong vibe from his response that he really doesn’t want to do this anymore and the use of AI is a way to make it easier on himself. He goes through some pretty lame arguments (aren’t humans just stochastic parrots‽ We don’t know!) and confesses he’d much rather stay retired and be sailing most of the time.

I think his heart is in the right place, but this is no longer a labor of love and it shows. Also, I think another point is that, given the criticality of rsync to so many businesses maybe they could fund development and maintenance of it? What a novel idea.

I don't find this bug absurd. It affects linux kernels <5.6 which reached EOL sometime before 2021.

> the use of AI is a way to make it easier on himself.

I don't see what's wrong with either this or his response in that post.

> I don’t think AI assisted code is bad, but I really question tridge’s approach here.

What specifically is the part you're questioning?

I wouldn't say these are "basic bugs". The first is specific to using 'rrsync', and the second is when using the rsync daemon, and I can't remember when I last saw a system using that one (yes, I'm aware there are still use cases for using the rsync protocol, but I would consider it pretty obscure nowadays).

You could argue that he should've bumped the version more and should've done a longer beta test, but on the other hand, these were mostly security fixes, and I can understand he wanted to get them out there rather sooner than later (also "doing a beta test" is easier said than done - how do you get people to run a test version of rsync?).

>The vibe coding got the project attention and it looks like he's going to get the help he needed.

I guess vibecoding certain software is now the new way of "instead of asking for help, write the wrong solution instead".

Not saying that's the case here, but in a way that's how it's always worked. Ask for help, get little to no response. But break something and people respond in a hurry, especially if it somehow affects them.

I wonder whether there would have been less complaint had the number been a major increase, say to v4 beta. That amount of change in a minor version number bump seems unusual, but I don’t know rsync enough, I just use the version bundled in my 2/4 year old LTS distros and assume it works.

This does once again feel like a case of https://xkcd.com/2347/

I do wonder about “The world of software engineering has changed dramatically in the last few months”. Has it really? I’ve been hearing that for a few years now.

A major version bump would have been helpful, and having such a large rewrite be initially a beta could have calmed the hoards.

> The world of software engineering has changed dramatically in the last few months

I disagree, but I guess we shall see how this is going to pan out. We've all introduced schoolboy errors in our time regardless of how long we've been developers. Messing up absolute paths because you only tested on relative happens to the best of us, but generally we say "woops" and try to fix it.

Doubling down and blaming users for your fuck up rarely ends well.

I don't think they blamed the users for that mistake, though. They specifically thanked people for reporting the regressions. It's the rage from bystanders which is totally out of proportion with the scale of the issues that they take issue with.

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