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Comment by rowanseymour | Hacker News Reader

We even find ourselves creating PRs in situations where the code is going to be merged immediately anyway, and tagging other devs, just so they have a convenient way to see what got merged and why. So people don't lose track of what is in the codebase.

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It's a good practice. Worth mentioning also: the same can be done with ordinary git log, assuming everyone is using git well. A proper git log of yesterday's work can be like your work newspaper with coffee.

this seems like a chain of good practices. though I find it hard to stay disciplined about keeping commits well scoped and well described

Becoming very comfortable with "rebase --interactive" and other cmds for editing your (local!) history before merging helps a lot. Once you are, it only adds 5m or so of extra work to most PRs. And while acquiring this knowledge used to be difficult, LLMs make it very easy these days.

I would also recommend an editor designed for rebases. I use the nodejs rebase-editor TUI (though it looks like the old non-vibecoded releases have been removed from github, so unclear on the current availability of this one) which makes it easier to organize

You can setup most PR systems to squash on merge using the first commit's message, then enforce that the top commit message is prefixed with a ticket ID. This practice has many benefits: readable git log, easier git bisect for tracking down regressions, it becomes easy to find all commits associated with a block of work, more useful git blame.

I strongly recommend against auto-squashing. It creates large commits without the semantic intent of the author. In a large PR, you want clean, small, semantic commits, which makes it much easier to review and understand.

I agree, though it feels like a bit of a lost cause at times to get people to make those commits

this is a great way to train people to ignore PR emails/notifications

Maybe but those people are also having claude summarize their inbox and get nice little daily reports on things they might want to look into.

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