'Please do not vibe f–- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row
A recent update to the rsync software has led to broken incremental backups, sparking a debate over the use of AI in coding. Users discovered that several commits were attributed to the AI assistant Claude, raising concerns about the reliability of AI-generated code in critical software. The creator of rsync, Andrew Tridgell, defended his use of AI, stating that he manually reviewed the code and did not solely rely on AI for development.
- ▪Incremental backups for rsync users began failing after an update to version 3.4.3.
- ▪The controversy arose when users found AI-assisted commits in the project's history.
- ▪Andrew Tridgell defended his use of AI, emphasizing that he manually reviewed the code generated by AI tools.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 2,541 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | theregister |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/04/please-do-not-vibe-f-up-this-software-broken-backups-spark-ai-coding-row-in-rsync-project/5251189 |
| Publication time | Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:15:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-05T03:21:10.232Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-05T03:21:10.232Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | OYGdOHUvsqiZ |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); AI and ml 'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project Users probe backup failures find Claude-assisted commits. Veteran engineer retorts: "I did not just vibe-code 'convert test suite to python'." Carly Page Carly Page Published thu 4 Jun 2026 // 14:45 UTC 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…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at theregister.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from theregister
