Rsync, the file synchronization utility that has quietly underpinned essentially every backup system in the Unix and Linux world since the mid-nineties, shipped a release earlier this year with regressions affecting incremental backup workflows. Users digging through the commit history found dozens of commits attributed to "tridge and claude" — that's Andrew Tridgell, the project's creator and a foundational figure in open-source infrastructure, working alongside Anthropic's Claude. A GitHub post titled, with the expletive sanitized, "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software" lit the fuse. The Register reported it this week.

Tridgell responded with a Medium piece called "Rsync and Outrage" defending his process. Forty years of software engineering experience. Every commit reviewed personally. AI tooling adopted in response to a flood of AI- ...