Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

> Are you a software engineer looking for ways to make your workflow more efficient, or tired of manually sifting through long commit logs to understand pull requests? Introducing the GPT summarizer GitHub action: a powerful tool that leverages OpenAI’s latest and greatest large language model to generate concise and informative summaries of the entire pull request, as well as descriptions of the changes to individual files and individual commits.

This kind of stupid.

1. At best, all this can do is look at what you actually committed, but that's not going to tell you the most useful stuff that should be included in a commit message, like why you're making the change in the first place and what your intent was (which may deviate from what you actually did).

2. If you wrote the damn commits, you should be able to describe them yourself. If you can't, something's wrong.

The only case where I can see a tool like this being useful, instead of a bad habit, is summarizing old commits, where the committer didn't put anything useful in the commit message.

"Let GPT write the description, so you can focus on the explanation" would be better

It isn’t stupid if it works. If this allows an engineer to spend 15 mins less time while generating good enough PR descriptions, that’s a huge win, especially if the developer isn’t a native English speaker. IME people after getting whatever they’re working on to pass tests don’t feel like writing prose about their work. This would significantly reduce the burden of work which is perceived ‘low value’ and ‘boring’ by most (yes I do review code and yes I will reject a PR without a summary).

> It isn’t stupid if it works. If this allows an engineer to spend 15 mins less time while generating good enough PR descriptions, that’s a huge win...

It can't work, unless it's hooked up to a brain scanner and can read your thoughts.

It seems more like dumb thing that people who don't know what they're doing will think is smart.

You see a tool which doesn’t do all you want it to do and say it’s useless where it clearly can make the act of actually doing what you want simpler and faster. I don’t understand why you think it’ll do 100% if 80% is already good enough and very helpful to get the last 20% done.

It's a path to laziness and skipping the 20% that's actually helpful in favor of a useless 80%.

I see a useful use case for using a tool like this after the commit messages are written (e.g. auto-generate these summaries on the fly when browsing history), but using it to write commit messages themselves is a terrible idea.

The reality is that writing a decent commit message, by some reasonable standard involve information not encoded in the contents of the commit (or any linked data). The contents of the commit are almost a side-effect of the actual work.

As such, no amount of “gpt magic” will solve this.

I think the biggest problem is GPT is very confident in its mistakes. If it writes something incorrect, and you don’t know it’s doing it it’ll go completely unchallenged.

It’s correct often enough that you can get complacent.

> IME people after getting whatever they’re working on to pass tests don’t feel like writing prose about their work.

Communication is part of the job. How many well-paid and creative professions get to just "nope" out if their responsibilities like that?

Those 15 saved minutes you will have to spend to validate that generated message actually makes sense. And if you are not careful, you will have to spend much more time 'rewriting history' later.

Also if an engineer has troubles describe change than maybe you don't want that change to end up in you repo.

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