this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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217
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
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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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[–] ooterness@lemmy.world 31 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 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.

[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 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 12 hours ago (2 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?

[–] ooterness@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)
[–] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 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

[–] Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 9 hours ago

Yes it all broke which is how people noticed