Programming

You realize you don't need to list all your changes in the commit message, right? Anyone can blame or diff said changes.

The commit message is meant to be used for the high level stuff, the intent, representing / connecting progress towards a larger work item, and other important context from outside the codebase. Insert other reasons that aren't saying literally what was changed if you feel I have missed something.

Also one should use their time better if they are spending so much time writing commit messages they feel the need to automate it. Commit messages are rarely read ever again (once merged, lets say), it is not okay to be spending a lot of time on them. That's not an excuse to write bad commit messages, but you have to balance the time cost with expected utility.

And an addendum to the above. Describing what you did without reasoning, context, or other information that isnt captured within the changes itself makes your commit messages entirely useless. It makes IDE-inserted in-line blame information useless as well. Thus you are now wasting all the time you spend on commit messages, even if you spend less because it's automated.

so it reads proprietary code?

Why don't you know WHY you did something to the codebase that you now want to commit?

Relying on an LLM for that sounds like a crutch that you need to get rid of ASAP!

If it's faster to get an AI to write your commit messages than to write them yourself, your commit messages are too long. They should be one sentence.

Why do you need to spend a "considerable amount of time crafting commit messages?" That feeding your code into an LLM and getting it to summarise for you is faster? I don't understand how this could possibly streamline anyone's workflow? What do your commit messages normally look like?

If you were on my team and I knew you were doing this, aside from all the other issues everybody else has mentioned in this thread, I'd be going out of my way not just to check every single one of your git commits (both code changes and commit messages) for inaccuracies but also also to find every possible reason to nit pick everything you committed.

You shouldn't be using LLMs to write your git commits (messages or code changes.) They hallucinate. But if you are going to use them, you need to spend much more time proofreading what they output than you'd spend writing it yourself. Check every single word for errors. (And, honestly, make the text fit with the way other commits by your team read (assuming you are on a team).)

In short, if you're going to use LLMs, DO NOT TRUST ANYTHING THEY GIVE YOU. And don't be surprised if you get negative blowback from others for using them at all. Keep in mind what can happen if you trust LLMs.

Great, I still write "updated stuff". Maybe I'll try doing that instead.

Im shocked at all the negativity, this seems like an obvious good usecase to me, and I'm someone who finds most AI predictive stuff useless.

I never take more than 3 sec on my commit messages, most of them are "fix bug", "update lib", "bump". So it's a pretty low bar for it to make better messages than mine.

So what I get from this is that some people need to be forced to write decent commit messages.

Echoing what others have mentioned, commit messages need to document why something was changed and put it into the context of the project. You should do this even for private projects, just so 1) you build good habits and 2) if you let the project rest for a while you don't need to figure put everything from the start again.

it’d be interesting to see some examples of what your script came up with - I’m a bit skeptical of what an AI would come up with in terms of a commit message, and I’d think you’d need a pretty complex system to get commit messages to be maximally useful. I’ve found LLMs can stray towards being too high level and struggle if you ask more specific questions.

but I could also see it as being helpful for a sort of audit log for what changed, and I don’t think it would be too harmful, as long as you’re checking what the LLM is generating and making sure there’s corresponding code changes, that it’s not hallucinating etc.

hard to tell without examples - perhaps you could expand your post with some?

an aside, sorry you got such an overwhelmingly toxic response. the amount of angry people on this platform who feel the need to morally educate everyone around them objectively sucks and makes it a really unpleasant place to be.

I'm really curious to see examples of commit messages.

And more details on how you achieved it, I'd like to give it a go myself, as some of my coworkers commit messages are less than stellar.

Does it write in the conventional commit formalism ?

This assumes anyone ever reads them.

Sounds like an incoming resume generating event.

Okay, so to be honest, at first, I didn't understand all the ❌negativity, but I shared this with a friend to get her take on the issue, and she 🕵️‍♀️clued me into the fact that webpack already does this with copilot and pull requests, and the results . . . speak for themselves.

Wow😅. I didn't think it would be that bad. It seems that every example I find is just incorrect. I'll look at the code. It will be a two line change, but the summary will be difficult to follow and often says things that are not part of the code changes. Then, there are also contradictions which make the pull requests harder to follow than if you just read the code with no other context. Darn it. I really thought this was a 🧊cool idea.

I'm definitely going to be sticking to writing my own commits as always.

Is this an open source project?