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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

> The 20 most-changed files in the last year. The file at the top is almost always the one people warn me about.

What a weird check and assumption.

I mean, surely most of the "20 most-changed files" will be README and docs, plus language-specific lock-files etc. ?

So if you're not accounting for those in your git/jj syntax you're going to end up with an awful lot of false-positive noise.

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Why would you touch the README file hundreds of times a year?

You're right about package.json, pnpm-lock etc though, but those are easy to filter out if the project in question uses them.

> Why would you touch the README file hundreds of times a year?

You're right, perhaps I should have said CHANGELOG etc.

Although some projects e.g. bump version numbers in README or add extra one-liner examples ....

Just look at the second file in the list then I guess.

This post is about exploring code, not documentation. Nobody is going to warn you about the README unless it is super outdated.

Some readme files include changelogs. But aside from that I think this can still net some useful information. I like to look at the most recently changed files in a repo as well.

It’s easy enough to filter those out with grep. It still is relatively meaningless. If the team incrementally adds things then it’s just going to show what additions were made. It isn’t churn at all.

Fair point. I skip lockfiles, changelogs, and generated code. The first application file on the list is the one that matters. Should have been explicit about that in the post.

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