Keeping it real with the commit msgs
They "made something ~100 tflops faster" and peoples' comments are "their commit messages are bad"? You guys would hate how John Carmack worked, too
Would love to see Carmack's commit messages. Just the other day I unsuccessfully tried to look for pictures of his office newer than QuakeIII era. Want ti figure out his ergonomics for working (presumed) 10h days well into middle age.
They're mostly not exactly prose but remember this was almost 40 years ago when the dominant style of writing code in some places was still ye olde K&R C with one letter variable names and goto everywhere
Fix dynamic channel list by passing auth via metadata
- Pass userId and userEmail in metadata when calling HTTP transport
- AuthenticatedToolsProviderFactory now reads from context.metadata
- Each tools/list request creates a fresh ToolsProvider with authentication
- Execute command description now correctly shows currently online machines
- Tested locally and working correctlyI use conventional commit formats for a reason, and the AI can’t even attempt it. I’m not even sure I’d trust it to get the right designation, like “fix(foo)!: increase container size”.
In our case the agent has access to Jira and has wider knowledge. For commit messages i don’t bother that much anymore (i realise typing this), but for the MRs I do. Here i have to instruct it to remove implementation details.
The agent can't do that if you told Claudepilotemini directly to make some change without telling it why you were prompting it to make such a change. LLMs might appear magic, but they aren't (yet) psychic.
He's saying that he likely has an MCP connected to jira on the LLM he's developing with.
Hence the prompt will have already referenced the jira ticket, which will include the why - and if not, you've got a different issue. Now the LLM will only need something like "before committing, check the jira ticket we're working on and create a commit message ...
But whether you actually want that is a different story. You're off the opinion it's useful, I'd say it's rarely doing to be valuable, because requirements change, making this point in time rational mostly interesting in an academic sense, but not actually valuable for the development you're doing
It depends on a ton of factors, and at least I'd put very little stock in the validity of the commit message that it might as well not exist. (And this is from the perspective of human written ones, not AI)
∞ Try make the code sensible & readable so it can be the documentation.
∞ Comment well anyway, just in case it isn't as obvious to the reader (which might be me in a few months time) as it is to me when making the change. Excess comments can always be removed later (and, unless some idiot rewrites history, can potentially be referred to after removal if you have a “why t f” moment), comments you never write can't be found later.
∞ Either a directly meaningful commit message, or at very least ticket references to where more details can be found.
For personal tinkering, I'm a lot less fastidious.
It never actually is at any non-minimal scale (and not even the code authored by the the people who claim code is self documenting).
My comment was rhetorical and sarcastic.
/s
When the "why" isn't explained, you end up with things like someone refactoring code and spending time (at best) trying to figure out why some tests now fail or (at worst) breaking something in production.
I'd argue that even the "how" sometimes is better explained in plain words than in code (even if that opens the door for outdated comments when code is changed).
This is completely meaningless and just pollutes the log.
"[Tangentially related emoji] I have completed this fully functional addition to the project that is now working perfectly! There are now zero bugs and the system is ready for deployment to production! [Rocketship emoji]"
Then of course you test it out and it doesn't work at all! It's very grating. It would be more bearable if it hedged its claims a bit more (maybe that will negatively affect the quality of the results though - if training a model to output insecure code also makes it a murderous Hitler admirer then, since when humans hedge their output is less likely to be perfect, it may mean it pushes the model to output code that is less than perfect).
This made me laugh so hard. Never trust an AI model saying “There are now zero bugs”! Weaponized incompetence? :)
As a side note, I absolutely am in love with GPT-5 and GPT-5-codex. When I talk to it, it feels like talking to a peer and not an over enthusiastic (but talented) junior with potential. GPT-5-codex on high has been exceptional at debugging insidious bugs.
If a human puts that, I doubt it. If I know they are using “AI” to fill in commit message I'll just assume it is a complete hallucination.
@Mogball Mogball merged commit ade3d49 into main on Jul 9