This is the guy who accidentally forced the creation of git, by reverse engineering the BitKeeper protocol and getting all the Linux kernel developers' licenses revoked. Chaotic Good energy.
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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So i dug up a bit about Andrew Tridgell:
- The reverse engineering details: https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/
- License offering and revocation: https://github.com/CuriousCurmudgeon/history_of_vcs/blob/master/06_bitkeeper.md
Hooray! It's good to see another retired dev with 40 years exp respond more eloquently than I ever can to the flood of anti-AI rage. What gets me most about the rage is the absolutism - the assumption that anyone who uses AI is either stupid or evil. There's almost no genuine engagement on the topic, mostly just angry shouting. But you see that a lot online - some people think social media is Fight Club.
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Seems like he’s been pushed into using LLMs as a way to cope with the deluge of LLM-generated security reports
It's not just LLM generated security reports, but vulnerabilities discovered by AI. Your wording implies they were just reports, and of less validity. Lazy LLM reports are not what he is trying to cope with, since there is nothing to do but close those reports. He is talking about real, verified, vulnerabilities that weren't discovered until AI tools. Not because humans couldn't find them, but none ever did. When it comes to finding, it really doesn't matter if it's found by human or AI, since that doesn't change its existence or severity.
And the side that noone else talks about, threat actors are highly likely to be using ai to find these potential vulnerability. So you you are not doing the same you are immediately at a disadvantage
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Repost of my reply elsewhere:
This guy is already retired, he wants to spend his days sailing and here we are bitching about rsync not being good enough while we all use if for free
Most of us won't be able to help code, fine.
But most of us could help with translations
Many of us could help with documentation
Some of us could contribute regularly with small financial donations
Some of us might have enough knowledge and expertise and experience to help code
Others could come up with other tasks that could be done.
The point is: rsync need more resources. Either we get him more resources or we STFU about the retired dev using AI. We can't have it both ways.
I think it's unreasonable to complain that the guy is not working enough for free.
I think it's reasonable to alert people that rsync is not being properly maintained anymore and to seek alternatives.
I would prefer the maintainer to announce publicly that he can't maintain the project anymore and is looking for help/someone to take over instead of breaking the project silently.
But where will the maintainers for these alternatives come from, when barely anybody has stepped up in the 30 years of rsync's existence? Your comment implies that tridge didn't call for help before, which is far from the truth.
This is thankless maintenance on critical software, not some *-arr toy project for hobbyist self-hosters.
But where will the maintainers for these alternatives come from, when barely anybody has stepped up in the 30 years of rsync's existence?
Universal Healthcare would increase the pool of willing developers by an order of magnitude here.
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I used AI tools to do the grunt work because they are good at that.
This is something people complaining should remember. AI is good at some parts of the work of a software engineer: the grunt work.
People pointing at new breakages are trying to say "No it isn't and here's the proof".
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Apparently not good enough, if we look at the case of rsync. Remember, this while conversation started because of some show stopping bugs caused by generated code.
As a software engineer, the grunt work is reasoning about my code, something a statistical model can't do.
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