alt.hn

5/30/2026 at 8:32:57 AM

Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits

 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390

by fooker

5/30/2026 at 9:10:24 AM

Looks fine? most of the commits are tests, ci, docs and issues that could cause memory corruption / hidden bugs rather than any new feature development. Of course it's unfortunate that it caused this bug to surface and it would be curious to investigate exactly why this happened, maybe the "safe" c operations have different (unexpected) behavior instead of immediately pointing out that "ai bad". I think patching issues that could cause future CVE's is pretty important especially because rsyncing a file -> client compromise could be pretty devestating as it often runs unsandboxed.

Everyone is still learning how and how much AI should be used and we shouldn't be too harsh on opensource developers. (edit: if someone hears "you are irresponsible if you don't let claude review your code", it would be pretty natural to let AI review your code and fix issues without knowing the full implications of it)

I suspect this commit: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/4fa7156ccdb2ad3..., appears to be changing behavior and changes like these shouldn't be in a patch version (unless it's an active security exploit).

by himata4113

5/30/2026 at 9:15:52 AM

Yeah this is how software development works now, no matter how much anyone wants to disagree with it. The technology is here, you can't put it back in the box. If your tool has AI agents trying to find exploits 24/7, you'll need something comparable.

It is worth figuring out the new science of software engineering to get it right.

I suspect we are going to find plenty of new techniques that make this sort of development work better. After all, it took fifty years to arrive at our best known (unit test + reviewable tiny change, get an LGTM) model of software development.

by fooker

5/31/2026 at 11:56:49 AM

no, no, no. if we all stomp our feet and kvetch really loud, a Hawaii judge will declare AI illegal and order a global moratorium. all trillion dollar companies will immediately cease all AI activities, and then UN death squads will go door-to-door confiscating assault GPUs from the chuds.

by b65e8bee43c2ed0

5/31/2026 at 2:32:01 PM

Yeah but what are the downsides?

by vogon_laureate

5/30/2026 at 9:16:49 AM

> Everyone is still learning how and how much AI should be used and we shouldn't be too harsh on opensource developers.

The main problem with using AI in open source software is that millions of people rely on your code, but you risk exposing them all to something unverified.

by nalekberov

5/30/2026 at 9:32:20 AM

If millions of people are relying on free software, that's their problem, isn't it? The maintainer has zero obligations to them, and they are not entitled to anything. If they want commercial support or SLAs, they could tender an offer, or else they can fork it and maintain it themselves. I think the maintainer here is being a silly goose but it's their right to be as silly as they want in their own repo.

by applfanboysbgon

5/30/2026 at 9:30:16 AM

Well maybe we shouldn't then? Before LLMs some not just clueless but also malicious rando could've send a PR too. And the maintainers might've gotten burned out any and just said f-it and merged stuff randomly. I don't see how AI changed the calculation here much.

by Bigpet

5/31/2026 at 5:19:39 AM

Before, there was a chance to spot it (and things like XZ Utils backdoor were rare), now it will be well hidden in the ocean of slop PRs.

by BoneShard

5/31/2026 at 8:17:47 AM

No reasonable maintainer would recklessly merge something he/she hasn’t reviewed. Well, those who blindly accept whatever AI outputs… perhaps it’s time for them to find another job.

Just because one offers software for free doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be standards.

by nalekberov

5/31/2026 at 10:16:35 AM

That's an interesting use of the word 'job'. How much is the rsync maintainer paid?

by foldr

5/31/2026 at 10:29:03 AM

My bad, I meant profession.

by nalekberov

5/31/2026 at 10:31:28 AM

Same issue there. A profession is an occupation that you get paid for doing.

AFAIK the rsync maintainer does it for free. And he mainly seems to be getting abuse in return for that service.

by foldr

5/31/2026 at 11:08:46 AM

> Same issue there. A profession is an occupation that you get paid for doing.

Wrong, a profession is an occupation that requires specialized training or qualifications. This means one can have a profession and still not get paid.

> And he mainly seems to be getting abuse in return for that service.

What abuse you are referring to?

by nalekberov

5/31/2026 at 11:17:59 AM

If you want to go down that semantic route, then being an open source maintainer clearly isn't a profession, as it requires neither specialized training nor qualifications!

In terms of abuse, I was thinking of this issue thread: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/929

by foldr

5/31/2026 at 11:50:24 AM

> If you want to go down that semantic route, then being an open source maintainer clearly isn't a profession, as it requires neither specialized training nor qualifications!

Open source software maintenance without qualifications? I hope you understand how disastrous it would be for serious software like rsync.

by nalekberov

5/31/2026 at 12:17:28 PM

I should think most open source software is maintained by people without any special training or qualifications. And would you expect to obtain the services of, say, a highly qualified plumber or electrician for free?

It might be more useful if qualifications were required before people were allowed to complain about open source software on internet message boards. That’ll be the day!

by foldr

5/30/2026 at 9:42:57 AM

Yes, you risk reputation and still need to be careful. One way to try to mitigate is to write tests. Which is what rsync project is doing, too. But there's only so much you can catch alone.

And BTW, you're not distributing to millions of people as an author of the code.

There are distributions maintainers between you and the world, which can also intervene, and are responsible for what they distribute, build testing on many configurations/architectures/versions - and can decide to revert to protect users, etc. And often do.

FOSS authors themselves can't be expected to keep around outdated systems from 5 years ago just to test build compatibility, in 8 different architectures that someone may want to build their code with.

Very few projects have as comprehensive testsuite as say sqlite. You can never cover everyting, so the beauty of FOSS is that someone will come and tell you and send you a fix for their special system, and now everything is again fine for that one special person, or distro maintainer.

by megous

5/30/2026 at 9:30:02 AM

You also risk exposing users to any other error you make. That's called a bug.

Unless someone points to vibe coded/hallucinated code causing the breakage or provides clues that might indicate unreviewed slop code being committed and shipped, I'd hold my horses.

by jasonvorhe

5/30/2026 at 8:54:43 AM

Currently there are 130 Claude-coauthored commits, and the maintainer seems to not be engaging with any of the recent issues and just pushing more of the "security in depth" fixes that are breaking real features for people.

by Tiberium

5/30/2026 at 8:57:38 AM

Citation needed :) That's a bold claim. May be true, but it's a bold one, so something backing it up would be nice.

by zero_k

5/30/2026 at 8:58:27 AM

Could one not simply look at the github to verify it with their own eyes? One of git's defining features is every commit being accountable

by CursedSilicon

5/31/2026 at 11:45:12 AM

Yes the person making the accusation could do that

by dataangel

5/30/2026 at 9:04:32 AM

Go look for yourself, quite a few mention CVEs.

by blurbleblurble

5/30/2026 at 9:15:09 AM

Reposting some of the (likely) bad commits with issues open against them, just to show that this isn't a one-off:

- https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/4fa7156ccdb2ad3...: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/905 https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/900

- https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/1d5b5ab83af84db...: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/924

- https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/859d44fa4f14207...: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/897

- https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/30656c5e358b1c6...: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/896 https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/915

- https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/8112445318a35e4...: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/910 https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/927

by Tiberium

5/30/2026 at 10:39:08 AM

I reckon we will soon see a growing movement of maintainers forking popular open-source projects to the point before vibecoding was introduced to the development process.

I can definitely see myself supporting this. Vibecoding promotes the uncontrollable growth of features, and thus bugs, when the vast majority of software benefits from stability. It should be possible to be done with development, barring security patches and bug fixes.

by sph

5/30/2026 at 2:56:22 PM

Counterpoint: AI makes refactoring so much easier. Many of our monolithic code bases have gotten smaller and more organized because we were too lazy to refactor.

by zulux

5/30/2026 at 9:02:56 AM

It's rather ironic that in profit making enterprises using AI are not only encouraged but also part of KPIs. But in open source it's scourge

by eunos

5/30/2026 at 10:41:01 AM

Pride in one'one's journey, the feeling of accomplishment for creating/learning/doing something, and the general art within the act...

Yes, it's ironic that the stock photo companies offer on-demand image generation when the private galleries only offer photos which required an adventure and effort.

by tactlesscamel

5/30/2026 at 10:43:33 AM

Well it is a scourge in both.

by sph

5/30/2026 at 9:12:49 AM

I don't think using AI as such is the core problem here. It's the type of use. Vibe coding, brain off coding and blind trust are the issue, and an issue everywhere, just enterprises were never really about quality in the first place. But eventually, they too will generate more crap than they can handle.

by 3form

5/30/2026 at 9:22:40 AM

I mean, we have no idea how tridge is using claude. I would easily give him the benefit of the doubt that he's not vibe-coding, is involved in the change (not just turning on auto-accept), and reviews the output before committing.

But it seems like everyone's immediate hot take here and on Mastodon is to assume the worst and shit on him.

by kelnos

5/30/2026 at 12:47:28 PM

To be precise, I meant the open source as a whole, as this is what the parent poster mentioned. I don't know about Tridge, I would review the changes first to see what happened there.

For rsync in general, I would say that the important value is the trust in it not breaking my data, more so than other projects. That trust can be broken in different ways, AI or not, and the means are of a secondary concern. I hope this gets sorted out soon.

by 3form

5/30/2026 at 6:04:41 PM

How is that ironic? It’s literally two sides of the same coin.

by archagon

5/30/2026 at 9:07:08 AM

Why ironic? It seems to me no different than s/AI/dark patterns/

by duskdozer

5/30/2026 at 9:00:28 AM

So, has anyone actually checked if it's just an issue with 3.4.3? Going to back to 3.4.1 skips 3.4.2 which features many contributions that aren't either by Andrew or Claude.

by jasonvorhe

5/30/2026 at 9:03:30 AM

They have not

by blurbleblurble

5/30/2026 at 9:09:52 AM

Seems like 3.4.2 was already vibe-maintained: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/v3.4.2

by omgtehlion

5/30/2026 at 9:20:58 AM

It's pretty shitty to accuse someone of vibe-coding without having any idea what their LLM-assisted development process is. Let's do better, please.

by kelnos

5/30/2026 at 9:20:32 AM

So? May main point is: Which commits actually broke the functionality? Going from 3.4.3 to 3.4.2 to test should be easy for anyone affected and would have been more helpful than this rant.

I'm not defending bad slop commits, especially for such a long running project but the tribal Fediverse outrage whenever LLMs are involved is often just lazy and uninformed.

To quote this PR: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/928

> NOTE: This also affects backported rsync versions when they're used on the Receiver: > Debian: 3.4.1+ds1-5+deb13u3 / 3.2.7-1+deb12u5 / 3.2.3-4+deb11u3 > Ubuntu: 3.2.7-1ubuntu1.4

by jasonvorhe

5/30/2026 at 9:39:01 AM

Figuring out which commit broke what functionality is not something you can expect users to do.

by fooker

5/31/2026 at 1:11:55 PM

No, but that's probably a required skill to have before you initiate claims as to what the cause of the loss of functionality was.

by Lerc

5/30/2026 at 7:47:08 PM

If you're willing to build from source it's not particularly difficult with git bisect

by cbarnes99

5/30/2026 at 9:19:28 AM

So they’re just kind of implying a relationship between the 2 things?

Maybe there is one, but it doesn’t support the underlying “and that must mean AI bad” hypothesis as much as the author may think.

Somebody on the Rsync team has a new tool. They may have neglected their traditional responsibilities using it, but that’s not really a fault of the tool.

by solarkraft

5/30/2026 at 9:35:43 AM

I agree that it is not a fault of the tool, but of the human who must have used it improperly.

However, rsync is one of those applications where correctness has an extreme importance. If it fails completely, that is still not so bad, but any kind of subtle corruption in file data or in file metadata can be catastrophic.

I expect from an rsync developer a much higher standard for program correctness verification than for most other computer applications, so these events are very worrisome.

I do not care whether someone uses an AI tool, but I care very much about whether any written code, regardless of its author, is verified very thoroughly, or not.

by adrian_b

5/30/2026 at 9:30:13 AM

My guess is just open source maintainers trying out new genAI tools out of curiosity. Unintentional slopification

by rzmmm

5/30/2026 at 9:30:30 AM

> Maybe there is one, but it doesn’t support the underlying “and that must mean AI bad” hypothesis as much as the author may think.

It's a tweet. Do you expect thorough null-hypothesis validation from a tweet?

by delusional

5/30/2026 at 8:57:35 AM

I see that people are recommending rclone instead

by firtoz

5/30/2026 at 9:03:42 AM

Their loss

by blurbleblurble

5/30/2026 at 9:12:24 AM

Maybe he got notified from the mythos team of a bunch of vulnerabilities and then followed up using claude. Doesn't seem that unlikely.

What would you do if suddenly there were a dozen exploitable CVEs in your highly used open source project staring you down? Maybe you'd use the tool that found them to patch them as quickly as possible.

by blurbleblurble

5/30/2026 at 9:24:37 AM

I am absolutely willing to give tridge the benefit of the doubt here, but a note on what you said: I don't think you should ever patch a CVE "as quickly as possible". You should do it slowly, be very sure of the change, and test the hell out of it. You can easily introduce a new security vulnerability by rushing something like that.

by kelnos

5/30/2026 at 10:05:04 AM

Good point. I just can't imagine the urgency and pressure I'd feel.

by blurbleblurble

5/30/2026 at 11:06:36 PM

Looks like at least one of these issues was from a CVE [0], they don’t call out Mythos specifically though (“security researchers”). Many teams are sprinting on security issues atm (including mine, who put all product priorities aside two sprints ago), it must suck to be responsible for high-visibility/high-risk projects like rsync right now.

0: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-pfv9-gp3h-73xv

by threecheese

5/30/2026 at 8:58:23 AM

I suspect that many of the new cute CLI tools that people are vibecoding will turn into malware given some time.

Seeing this happening in trusted CLI tools makes me wonder what will happen to Linux

by mariopt

5/30/2026 at 9:17:26 AM

This is a problem of insufficient checking happening in-between a PR being made, and it being committed.

Imagine you have a low quality coder in your coders, they produce a lot of code, but while some of it is fine, some of it is... dubious. That is no different from an AI and the way you deal with it is the same. You check the PR before committing it.

To allow PRs from them (or anyone really) to get merged without proper checking for bugs etc is just sloppy repo management. The problem is not "AI bad, human good", it is that a human is allowing PRs through to release without properly checking them.

by My_Name

5/30/2026 at 9:58:56 AM

The commits were all from the original inventor of rsync.

Not a low quality newbie coder.

by bhaak

5/30/2026 at 11:20:51 AM

"To allow PRs from them (or anyone really) to get merged without proper checking for bugs etc is just sloppy repo management."

I stand by my post.

by My_Name

5/30/2026 at 11:52:32 AM

Your post makes no sense unless you speak about project management in general.

The commits in question are no pull requests.

by bhaak

5/30/2026 at 9:40:51 AM

What's the difference between experience a human made bug versus an AI made bug in software?

by vbtechguy

5/30/2026 at 9:55:51 AM

A human preserves more context and might remember what they did and when pointing out a new bug, they often have an idea what's wrong.

by bhaak

5/30/2026 at 10:44:39 AM

A human also learns from their mistakes and grows their skillset.

I cringe any time I read loaded questions like GP's. Have they ever met a human in their life?

by sph

5/31/2026 at 11:25:00 AM

The difference lies in the field of civic virtue. A human programmer accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the software of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The AI does not.

by atomlib

5/31/2026 at 11:46:58 AM

You must be trolling. Most open source software is released under MIT license which explicitly says the author isn't liable for anything.

by dataangel

5/30/2026 at 5:39:47 PM

Who cares? Is the quality good? Bug free? Readable? If so, I couldn't care less who developed the code.

by abc123abc123

5/30/2026 at 8:57:38 AM

I saw an exceptionally long and thoughtful post on Mastodon from "Space Hobo" https://teh.entar.net/@spacehobo that definitely deserves reprinting here

-----

I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.

Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).

I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.

I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.

In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.

Well... Tridge and #Claude, it seems: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345...

The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly unlike the person I met back in the day.

I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:

If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.

That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.

-----

by CursedSilicon

5/30/2026 at 9:47:59 AM

> If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.

> That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.

I disagree. The amount of commits is not from somebody who is carefully reviewing the new code and considering the changes done. It's from somebody who thinks they are in control and think they can guardrail the AI.

I've seen this at work as well. Maybe it's a small case of the braineater that so many tech bros get when they get older. But they talk about the AI as if it were a being that can be reasoned with and not that it's just a statistical interpolator and autocompleter.

I know when I'm vibe coding. Just last week I needed 5 colors for a green to read gradient for visualisation some states. I ended up with a script that outputs arbitray color gradients in 5 different colorspaces (including a colorspace for which AFAIK there's no support in Ruby as of now) and additionally also considers different color vision deficiencies.

Is it useful? Yes. Would I run this code in production? Hell no.

by bhaak

5/30/2026 at 10:48:55 AM

This is a common fallacy: that vibecoding is not that bad if one carefully reviews the output. It's true in a vacuum, but what happens when you're late and stressed out and can't be bothered with doing a proper job.

Humans are lazy, and the mistakes of being lazy when vibe coding are orders of magnitude larger than being lazy when you have to do the damn thing yourself. In fact in the latter case, laziness is a feature.

If the AI-powered software world depends on humans not being lazy, we're all fucked.

by sph

5/30/2026 at 11:25:31 PM

or more generously, replace lazy with tired. even if you have all the intention of reading all the code in detail, when you are tired you are less attentive.

finally, reading code can never achieve the same detailed understanding that you would get from writing it. reading anything in general can't achieve the same understanding as writing. our brain tries to optimize. you see something familiar, you skip over it because you recognize it, and that causes you to miss subtle details.

the one thing i wonder though is, how much would it help if i use AI to generate some code but then, instead of just copying the whole thing, i type it all in by hand. does that give me enough attention to review? does that still give me any benefit of using AI with less downsides?

by em-bee

5/31/2026 at 5:37:59 AM

At what point it’s just easier to do the whole thing yourself, perhaps prompting AI to give you guidelines and which whom to discuss the design, but never using it to code?

But then again, the day one is lazy or tired, one will choose the shortcut of having the machine just write the code.

by sph

5/31/2026 at 3:32:05 PM

well yes, that why i concluded that at this point using AI to help me is just not worth it. i'll wait until the reliability goes up and the level of frustration goes down.

for myself i don't even want to use it to learn because i a afraid of being told things that are false or don't exist. i already had that experience, spending hours trying to figure out why my code wasn't working until i realized that the AI told me to use a property or function that didn't exist. i hate wasting time and effort like that.

by em-bee

5/30/2026 at 11:09:19 PM

“letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him” or “overwhelmed with publicly released vulnerabilities and using any tool he can find to stop the bleeding”; same same.

by threecheese

5/31/2026 at 1:49:07 PM

>I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with [Andrew Tridgell] in two decades

But err, don't let that stop you, Space Hobo! I'm not sure how anyone is taking this Mastodon post seriously. The author barely knows Tridgell, but is supposedly 'concerned' because he hasn't posted to his local LUG mailing list for a few years. Isn't this the logic of the terminally online?

I notice that Space Hobo has a lot of posts warning about the dangers of AI slop. Given the rate at which they're able to produce copious quantities of their own artisanal variety, I can't imagine they have much to fear.

by foldr

5/30/2026 at 3:26:42 PM

Meh, I wonder how many Claude commits iOS, MacOS, or Windows has that we just don't see?

by devinprater

5/30/2026 at 9:08:22 AM

Oh, no :-(

I was hoping that at least some solid bedrock of stadalone command-line tools would withstand the deluge of AI slop.

Will we need to start to label programs with a "written by humans" sticker? :-(

by einpoklum

5/31/2026 at 2:00:34 PM

I'm thinking this will be a natural progression because part of the "AI slop deluge" are now real bug reports generated by these AIs. I'm glad for this noise around the regression as so many more folks are now aware of this issue.

by cowboylowrez

5/30/2026 at 9:21:55 AM

Well, there's 1 +claude commit prior Mythos/Glasswing announcement and the rest are after the announcement. Take of it what you will.

Anyway, seems blown out of proportion. There are a few issues in the tracker, some repeated or obscure. Linux 5.10, really? You want to run frankenkernel from 5 years ago with 30 000+ patches never meant or developed against it applied on top? Good luck. Rsync is least of your worries.

Linux stable, especially these 5 year old trees are mostly a pacifier for companies that don't want to upstream and maintain their drivers and keep up with evolving internal kernel interface. It's nothing good for users, technically.

And I guess if I clone the repo and do a diff against pre-claude and claude assisted state, most of the changes will not be in the actual C code.

by megous

5/30/2026 at 9:20:10 AM

[flagged]

by Ozzie-D

5/30/2026 at 9:34:38 AM

LGTM, ship it.

/s

Is there any sign of enough code review this release got?

by zx8080