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Comment by bikelang | Hacker News Reader

Reading threads like this and the GitHub stacked PRs just makes me feel like an alien. Am I the only one that thinks that commits are a pointless unit of change?

To me - the PR is the product of output I care about. The discussion in the review is infinitely more important than a description of a single change in a whole series of changes. At no point are we going to ship a partial piece of my work - we’re going to ship the result of the PR once accepted.

I just squash merge everything now. When I do git archeology - I get a nice link to the PR and I can see the entire set of changes it introduced with the full context. A commit - at best - lets me undo some change while I’m actively developing. But even then it’s often easier to just change the code back and commit that.

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You're not an alien: this is the workflow that GitHub encourages.

It's just that not every tool is GitHub. Other systems, like Gerrit, don't use the PR as the unit of change: they use the commit itself. And you do regularly ship individual commits. Instead of squashing at the end, you squash during development.

Thanks for explaining that. Having a bit of a (dim) lightbulb moment now. I’ve never used Gerrit - just GitHub and GitLab and Forgejo. So I assumed the PR/MR model was more or less universal. But if smaller development commits are being squashed into the shippable/reviewable unit - then the focus on commits makes a lot more sense.

You're welcome! It is one of those "do fish realize they're wet" kind of things, tools can shape our perception so strongly that you don't even realize that they're doing it!

You could agree that the PR is the meaningful unit for shipping, but push back gently that for agents working in parallel, the commit/changeset level matters more than it used to because agents don't coordinate the way humans do. Multiple agents touching the same repo need finer-grained units of change than "the whole PR."

Could you elaborate a bit more on this? Curious what your workflow looks like. Is this multiple agents running on the same feature/refactor/whatever unit of work? For concurrent but divergent work I just use a git worktree per feature. And I think I only ever have a single agent (with whatever subagents it spins up) per unit of work.

Think two agents working on the same codebase at the same time. Agent A is refactoring the auth module, Agent B is adding a new API endpoint that imports from auth. Separate worktrees, separate branches, but they're touching overlapping code.

ingle agent per feature works great today. But as agents get faster and cheaper, the bottleneck shifts to, how many agents can work on one repo simultaneously without stepping on each other.

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