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

  • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
    ·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • lonewalk@lemm.ee
    ·
    8 months ago

    it’d be interesting to see some examples of what your script came up with - I’m a bit skeptical of what an AI would come up with in terms of a commit message, and I’d think you’d need a pretty complex system to get commit messages to be maximally useful. I’ve found LLMs can stray towards being too high level and struggle if you ask more specific questions.

    but I could also see it as being helpful for a sort of audit log for what changed, and I don’t think it would be too harmful, as long as you’re checking what the LLM is generating and making sure there’s corresponding code changes, that it’s not hallucinating etc.

    hard to tell without examples - perhaps you could expand your post with some?

    an aside, sorry you got such an overwhelmingly toxic response. the amount of angry people on this platform who feel the need to morally educate everyone around them objectively sucks and makes it a really unpleasant place to be.

  • Emma @programming.dev
    ·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • deur@feddit.nl
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    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.