'Please Do Not Vibe F--- Up This Software': Broken Backups Spark AI Coding Row in Rsync Project
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Incremental backups started failing for some rsync users after a recent update, and what they found in the project's commit history quickly turned a routine bug hunt into yet another fight over AI-generated code.
The controversy centers on rsync 3.4.3, a security-focused release published earlier this year to fix multiple vulnerabilities. Shortly after the upgrade, some users reported that incremental backup workflows were no longer behaving as expected, with one user saying their backup system failed on anything other than a full backup.
Rsync creator Andrew Tridgell has pushed back against the criticism in a Medium post titled "Rsync and Outrage," arguing that many commenters have drawn conclusions without understanding how the AI tools were actually used.
Rsync is not a weekend side project maintained by three people in a Discord server. First released in the 1990s, it remains one of the most widely used file synchronization and backup utilities in the Unix and Linux world. Countless backup products, scripts, NAS appliances, and IT departments depend on it quietly doing its job without surprises.
That makes any suggestion of AI-assisted development in the project far more contentious than it might be elsewhere.
The backup issue might have remained a fairly ordinary bug report had users not started poking around in rsync's recent commit history. They found that since rsync 3.4.1, dozens of commits have been attributed to "tridge and claude," referring to rsync creator Andrew Tridgell and Anthropic's AI assistant Claude.
The discovery prompted a strongly worded GitHub post titled "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software," a reference to the increasingly common practice of handing coding tasks to AI models and trusting the results.
From there, the discussion spread to Reddit and Hacker News, where the conversation shifted from a backup bug to a broader debate about AI-generated code finding its way into critical open source infrastructure.
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