I looked at the rsync commit log and basically every commit since March says "tridge and claude committed." Andrew Tridgell, the guy who literally invented rsync in 1996. Now hes using a chatbot to write the code and proudly displaying its name right there in the commit.
And before anyone goes "calm down its just a typo fix" no. The recent stuff is the security fixes for 3.4.3. The symlink race CVEs.. You know, the exact part where you want an actual human who understands what hes doing, not a machine that spits out code that looks correct but has correctness errors.
Do you get how insane this is? Rsync is the thing holding up basically every backup system on earth. Your NAS uses it. Distro mirrors use it. The server with you grandmas photos uses it. And now the plan is to let a token predictor that can't even count the amount of letter R's in "strawberry" write code for it.
"But the tests pass." The tests pass because the AI probably wrote the tests too you walnut. Its a loop of confident nonsense thats grading its own homework, and the first time it hits an edge case nobody fed it its gonna silently corrupt something and noone notices till the backups are already poisoned.
I'm pinning v3.4.1 and not updating again. If you defend this, dont say nobody warned you when the data loss posts start appearing.
Since a senior engineer is clearly in the loop here I wouldn't pass judgement on these commits without looking at their actual content. LLMs can be used responsibly, too.
There are reported bugs https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390
The thing is, LLM can theoretically used be responsibly, just like heroin can be used in a way that doesn't cause crippling addiction. But nobody does that, and that's kind of the problem.
Yeah the role of the maintainer is to gatekeep the quality of the finished product. As long as they do that it's fine. The contributor could be a clanker or a junior trying to get their first PR, I don't care cause the person I trust is the maintainer.
Rsync's creator has been maintaining load bearing infra since before I learned to code, if you can't trust them who can you trust?
Fuck all clankers.
There was also a little debacle a while ago that VS Code was misattributing everything committed in git by users with its default CoPilot extension as being co-written by CoPilot.
Something like that could also be happening here.