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Rsync author responds to online outrage about his usage of LLMs (medium.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Seems like he's been pushed into using LLMs as a way to cope with the deluge of LLM-generated security reports.

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[–] 32 points 3 months ago* (11 children)

The whole rsync repo is 65k lines total. Recent AI-centric changes account for +16k/-6k, including massive changes to the unit tests. Somehow that's not even considered a "minor" update (v3.4.1 to v3.4.3).

That's not responsible use of AI, that's malpractice.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Any specific issues though? Yeah, it's a large change and I'd be more surprised if it didn't have issues, but are there any specific issues with the updates that have been found so far?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)
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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Yes, there’s been several regressions that would’ve been caught by the original tests, but missed by the new vibe-coded tests.

    That is directly contradicted by what the developer of rsync wrote in the linked article:

    yes, there were regressions in some use cases of rsync in the 3.4.3 release. ... None of those cases were covered by the existing rsync test suite or by all the manual testing I did (yes, I use rsync, I don’t just develop it).

    It's possible that somebody in the issue you linked to pointed to a test that would have caught one of the regressions, but I was not able to find it in the 327 comment mess. A direct link would be appreciated, if that is the case.

    But I doubt that you will find such a comment. Because I tried running the 3.4.1 test-suite with the 3.4.3 binary, and all tests passed

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Then get on your IDE and lend them a hand. Then the retired guy that's asked for help several times in the last decade unsuccessfully wouldn't have to buy tokens to get help.

    Seems like most people want to spend their effort getting on their high horse instead of being the change they want to see.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Do better then. Where's your contributions?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    I am the primary author of an open-source framework for Ethernet in embedded systems. There is not a single line of fucking AI slop in that repo, because I am not an irresponsible hack.

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