Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342705 - May 2026 (466 comments)

Rsync 3.4.3 has hundreds of Claude commits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334021 - May 2026 (81 comments)

A bit of a mixed one here.

The vibe coding got the project attention and it looks like he's going to get the help he needed.

However the "outrage", if you even call it that, wasn't entirely misplaced when pretty basic bugs were introduced by this, such as:

Can't use rsync with absolute paths:

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/922

Links mode is broken:

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/915

The scale of the commits, and rewriting the entire testing framework was pretty big for a "bugfix" revision.

> for the people saying things like “I’m a PhD from xyz uni and I’m telling your LLMs are just stochastic tools that make everything up and the world will fall apart if you use them”, I’m here to tell you that you are out of date. The world of software engineering has changed dramatically in the last few months.

It indeed has. I now review code written by machines that sucks the life of me, read reports written by a machine, and overall have a miserable life as a software engineer. The pay is good so I'll keep on it for the time being, but you are damn right it changed, for the worse.

11 hours since this has been posted and 20 comments. Nobody that's raging really cares about the reasoning. All that matters is: AI use spotted -> time for the warpath.

I really feel for the developer of Rsync. He did absolutely nothing wrong and got flamed to hell for it. I’m glad he has help now and I hope all of the negativity doesn’t get to him. I would certainly have a difficult time with my mental health if I was on the receiving end of all this hate.

All of this noise and velocity will provide significant cover for the Jia Tans of the world.

The sooner we all collectively realize that the commonly cited "reasons why LLM code is bad" and "reasons poorly architectured, poorly planned, poorly tested code is bad" are a circle on a Venn diagram, the sooner we can hopefully make some effort to escape this sports fan tribalistic nonsense.

What I miss there is specifics about bugs. One side says: „oh there are new commits authored by Claude and I see new bugs. rsync is dooomed”, Andrew replies: „I’d better be sailing, but we’ve refactored test framework with Claude and I know how it works and I’ve been cautious.” It would be great to see analysis about those bugs. Why, how and when fix is expected. Only this part is important IMHO.

It's sad that the outrage posts got hundreds of comments while this article, from the maintainer explaining the CVEs and test suites, only has this singular comment and is already on the second page.

A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes. Do better, HN.

> I did not just vibe-code “convert test suite to python”. I’m a software engineer with 40 years experience (yeah, I’m OLD!)

Interestingly enough, I see the trend of people with decades of experience using AI more and more often. I'm in the 20 years club myself, and I do AI-assisted coding every day. It does help, and I'm grateful to have a tool like this to quickly try new ideas and throw them away if they suck. Shaming the author for using AI to help with the CI stuff is baffling to me. Are we witnessing just another ideology-driven tribal reaction on the rise?

Related:

Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342705

> but I am being cautious, or as cautious as I can be given my desire to be sailing

Then step down as maintainer if you don't want to do it properly.

I think he should just retire for real (from rsync) and enjoy the time, who would take all the negativity and keep going for a volunteer project like rsync.

And this has nothing to do with AI. It seems to me that a significant amount of people in IT disconnected from reality.

Go throw a couple potatoes in the ground and see them grow or whatever. Your opinion most likely wont matter nor make any difference.