I worry if this is happening to things like rsync, what it means across the board. Who will continue to maintain the repos I have once I leave, retire, die, etc?

It does highlight the same thing we bring up over-and-over: we need to find ways to compensate experienced software developers to maintain open source software. Otherwise, script kiddies and LLMs will stomp all over it before long.

I bet like most of the people I've run into on this network of servers, that you probably have a doctorate on the subject, though. Everyone I know seems to have a doctorate on something, while I, the lowly slacker, never aspired to finish public school and took the GED to get the hell out of structured education. Discipline is not for me. More like being constantly disciplined.

Fork it!

Jesus Christ, get over yourself.

seriously? are we at that stage now?

Well it's simple, you just don't look at it and pretend because you got AN output it is correct cause "the AI" told you so.

People see "AI" as an authority figure and therefore assume it is correct without checking...

Yes, you can ask for small examples of things, of you are too lazy to open man pages, etc.

But putting any trust in the code these things spew out without thoroughly reading and understanding every line is incomprehensible to me. And when i do this, i tend to find I'd have been much better off just sitting it myself.

The problem it was solving was a well known one, and it was only solving the smallest subset of it.

The code could compile and run, but:
- because i have some domain knowledge i could see that the output was not correct
- it's sync feature was not satisfactory, at all
- the code was some of the worst I have seen in a long, long time things were split in ways that made absolutely no sense

Oh fuck not rsync too?
I've been using it for I-don't-even-know how long, probably close to 3 decades.