It writes more informative commits than I could ever make so I’m just reading what it says and mostly copy/pasting completely most of the time, I write all of the changes I’ve made into an LLM with a large context window and it write a very detailed commit not just with a title but with bullet points describing each of the changes precisely
If a glorified autocomplete algorithm can write more informative and concise commit messages than you, the actual author behind the code, I think you need to sit down and think long and hard what that actually implies.
And what does it imply?
That an AI might be better at writing documentation than the average dev, who is largely inept at writing good documentation?
Understandably, as technical writing isn’t exactly a focus point or career growing thing for most devs. If it was, we would be writing much better code as well.
I’ve seen my peers work, they could use something like this. I’d welcome it.
And what does it imply?
it implies that the author of the code has no idea what they were doing.
I disagree. I am capable of writing a good commit message, I just don’t really want to. Depending on the change, formulating a concise text that includes all relevant information can be quite time consuming.
I can travel to Italy on foot. Will I do that? Of course not. What does it imply? That I’m incapable of moving my body? Of course not! It just means I’m too lazy to do it and that there are faster ways to get to the same goal.
I disagree. I am capable of writing a good commit message, I just don’t really want to. Depending on the change, formulating a concise text that includes all relevant information can be quite time consuming.
formulating a concise text that includes all relevant information
how do you write Pull-Requests? Just half-assing it? Writing good commit messages help you write a good PR as well (as it can be just a summary of the things you commited) But yeah, you do you.
There is a saying, which I don’t generally agree with. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. That said, writing good code and describing code effectively are two different skills, and there is no guarantee any given individual will have both.
If a glorified autocomplete algorithm can write more informative and concise commit messages than you, the actual author behind the code, I think you need to sit down and think long and hard what that actually implies.
I don’t need to think long and hard to realize how lazy I am. Only a stupid person would need to think long and hard to realize something so simple.
And you are probably referring to the LLM generated post anyway, because I never said that it can write “more informative and concise commit messages than me”. You are the one saying that.
Don’t ever call me a glorified autocomolete algorithm again
If it’s faster to get an AI to write your commit messages than to write them yourself, your commit messages are too long. They should be one sentence.
And if one sentence isn’t enough, the commit has too many changes
Good old "various changes*
x
The worst commit history:
- fix
- fix
- cleaning
- fix
- wip
Strong disagree. Commit messages that are only one sentence long should be reserved for truly trivial things. Signed, someone who regularly comes back to 18+ year old commits and enjoys the valuable details that would have been lost.
How about prefixing your commit with a ticket number?
If a commit message has too much information, then the commit has too much changes
Not having to swap over to a ticketing system just to see the context of a change is really nice (Or to add context on why changes are done a certain way). One line that says what you changed, then any context such as why it was done that way, and important notes about that change works wonders. It’s pretty much the exact model the Linux kernel uses, and it makes looking at changes great for anyone down the line.
Good idea
You realize you don’t need to list all your changes in the commit message, right? Anyone can blame or diff said changes.
The commit message is meant to be used for the high level stuff, the intent, representing / connecting progress towards a larger work item, and other important context from outside the codebase. Insert other reasons that aren’t saying literally what was changed if you feel I have missed something.
Also one should use their time better if they are spending so much time writing commit messages they feel the need to automate it. Commit messages are rarely read ever again (once merged, lets say), it is not okay to be spending a lot of time on them. That’s not an excuse to write bad commit messages, but you have to balance the time cost with expected utility.
And an addendum to the above. Describing what you did without reasoning, context, or other information that isnt captured within the changes itself makes your commit messages entirely useless. It makes IDE-inserted in-line blame information useless as well. Thus you are now wasting all the time you spend on commit messages, even if you spend less because it’s automated.
Yeah, good commit messages are about intent and context of a change - not what the change itself is. We can look at the diff for that. Just write a single line or two summarizing what the commit does, and everything else should be adding context on top that doesn’t directly exist in the codebase.
Im shocked at all the negativity, this seems like an obvious good usecase to me, and I’m someone who finds most AI predictive stuff useless.
I never take more than 3 sec on my commit messages, most of them are “fix bug”, “update lib”, “bump”. So it’s a pretty low bar for it to make better messages than mine.
Why don’t you spend time on commit messages though?
I make really small and really frequent commits. Like I’ll commit all changes every 10 min regardless of if a feature is done or not, and basically use commits like an undo button.
I still use git history a lot (per file history usually) but even when browsing years and hundreds of commits into the past, I don’t really need detailed/thoughtful messages to find the change I’m looking for. Binary search plus those 2 or 3 word message hints are lightning fast. And the number of times I commit vastly outweighs the number of times I browse the history.
When it comes to documentation and other people, feature-branches are my “OK I fully finished this thing; here’s a summary”. I’m also not afraid to squash a ton of useless commits together right before making a PR.
TDLR; spending more than 3 sec doesn’t help future me or current me, so it’s a waste of time
Why don’t you know WHY you did something to the codebase that you now want to commit?
Relying on an LLM for that sounds like a crutch that you need to get rid of ASAP!
Of course he knows why he made the changes. He made them. But computers are much faster as typing and with a sophisticated enough LLM you can offload some gruntwork. I’d argue if you’re not utilizing all the tools at your disposal, you’re not performing like you should.
we are talking about programmers/software developers. Speed typing is in our nature. If you can’t type 50 characters faster than writing the prompt to get the LLM to spat out a commit meesage, then I will question your competence.
Also the opposite is true, when the Boss realise that major parts or grunt work as you say can be automated by utilising LLM, then they would be inclined to employ that and reduce your wage. Because do you really deserve 6 figures when a computer can do the grunt work for their expensive human resources?
This assumes anyone ever reads them.
So what I get from this is that some people need to be forced to write decent commit messages.
Echoing what others have mentioned, commit messages need to document why something was changed and put it into the context of the project. You should do this even for private projects, just so 1) you build good habits and 2) if you let the project rest for a while you don’t need to figure put everything from the start again.
Why do you need to spend a “considerable amount of time crafting commit messages?” That feeding your code into an LLM and getting it to summarise for you is faster? I don’t understand how this could possibly streamline anyone’s workflow? What do your commit messages normally look like?
I’m really curious to see examples of commit messages.
And more details on how you achieved it, I’d like to give it a go myself, as some of my coworkers commit messages are less than stellar.
Does it write in the conventional commit formalism ?
9.71KB paste
write brief git commit messageFix archive checking
- Refactor to use functions for common logic
- Check archive file after downloading playlists
- Remove aliases, simplify main commands
- Minor cleanups
I started asking this later
write brief git commit message using Conventional Commits style and bullet points, split into smaller chunks if necessary specifying the chunks
but it started splitting my commits in chunks
Wait, it can split commits ? I thought you “just” used a LLM to write the messages, but it can also act on the commits ?
How did you achieve this?
No it just writes the patch text that I pass split in chuncks with a git commit message for each of the chuncks, but I’m the one who has to copy that and perform the commit
Okay, so to be honest, at first, I didn’t understand all the ❌negativity, but I shared this with a friend to get her take on the issue, and she 🕵️♀️clued me into the fact that webpack already does this with copilot and pull requests, and the results . . . speak for themselves.
Wow😅. I didn’t think it would be that bad. It seems that every example I find is just incorrect. I’ll look at the code. It will be a two line change, but the summary will be difficult to follow and often says things that are not part of the code changes. Then, there are also contradictions which make the pull requests harder to follow than if you just read the code with no other context. Darn it. I really thought this was a 🧊cool idea.
I’m definitely going to be sticking to writing my own commits as always.
so it reads proprietary code?
I mean, if it’s self-hosted it’s probably fine
I don’t think that Lead and Projectmanager will love to hear that. At all.
y’all need to speak for your own companies. obviously some companies will not allow it, and I’d be personally skeptical of allowing it if I ran a company - but I also work at a place that effectively has given a quiet go-ahead to use it, with objectively talented engineers regularly making use of LLMs for boilerplate and other aspects of work.
obviously, there’s some calculus on when to use it, and you better damn inspect your outputs, but treating as a blanket rule that OP is a terrible employee at their company when you don’t know the company is rude as hell and uncalled for.
I think a lot of people in this thread are just upset/projecting because this is the first real hint that they’re not as much of a special-boy-programmer as they think. OP’s use case is fairly limited in scope, using the LLM for something it is actually pretty good for, and never implied he doesn’t check the output. They’ll never admit it, and will deflect, but they’re just worried.
Is this an open source project?
