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Rsync author responds to online outrage about his usage of LLMs (medium.com)
submitted 2 days ago by rimu@piefed.social 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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[-] iglou@programming.dev 28 points 20 hours ago

I used AI tools to do the grunt work because they are good at that.

This is something people complaining should remember. AI is good at some parts of the work of a software engineer: the grunt work.

[-] wpb@lemmy.world 1 points 29 minutes ago

Apparently not good enough, if we look at the case of rsync. Remember, this while conversation started because of some show stopping bugs caused by generated code.

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 4 points 2 hours ago

As a software engineer, the grunt work is reasoning about my code, something a statistical model can't do.

[-] wewbull@feddit.uk 25 points 19 hours ago

People pointing at new breakages are trying to say "No it isn't and here's the proof".

[-] Bazoogle@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

How do you know those were the result of the AI?

I quite deliberately tried to err on the side of fixing security issues for that release, and there were some valid (but unusual) use cases that got caught up in the changes.

Seems to me like it was just his own fault. AI may very well have had nothing to do with the regressions, other than maybe not identifying them?

[-] Nalivai@lemmy.world 5 points 12 hours ago

If the generator made a mistake, it's actually not its fault, and you can't prove it. If the code works, it's an amazing achievement of the machine, singularity is here, you don't need to look any further.

[-] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 2 points 13 hours ago

He rewrote the test suite to Python using AI tools, which I believe people are saying caused some otherwise detected cases to be missed.

[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 2 points 3 hours ago

Those people are wrong. The 3.4.3 release passes all the integration tests in the 3.4.1 release’s test-suite, which is the last release without LLM code. You can easily test this yourself

[-] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 1 points 9 minutes ago

Thanks for confirming! Really this dev just needs more maintainers for his project, but sadly people won't step up.

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

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