216
Rsync author responds to online outrage about his usage of LLMs (medium.com)
submitted 1 day ago by rimu@piefed.social to c/programming@programming.dev
126 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Seems like he's been pushed into using LLMs as a way to cope with the deluge of LLM-generated security reports.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] ooterness@lemmy.world 44 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Have you read the linked article? They explain how they used AI. It's not like AI produced the code and that's it.

They also explain about this version and the next minor version.

[-] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 5 points 23 hours ago

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?

[-] ooterness@lemmy.world 6 points 20 hours ago
[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

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

[-] ooterness@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Seems I was mistaken. My previous statement was based on what others have said, but I haven't actually run the tests myself. In any case, I have learned not to rely on statements made by the accused in this type of dispute.

[-] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 hours ago

No you learned to rely on the accusers lol

[-] Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 21 hours ago

Yes it all broke which is how people noticed

this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
216 points (100.0% liked)

Programming

27148 readers
758 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
UlrikHD@programming.dev
bugsmith@programming.dev
Spyro@programming.dev