Comment by spullara

Comment by spullara 9 hours ago

24 replies

View on Hacker News

what kind of AI are you using that generates shitty commit messages? This a common kind of message from Claude / Augment:

    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 correctly
xnorswap 8 hours ago

> - Tested locally and working correctly

This is completely meaningless and just pollutes the log.

Reply View 5 replies
  • joegibbs 6 hours ago

    God I can't stand it when I get this kind of output from Claude, they really need to train it out for Claude 5.

    "[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).

    Reply View 1 reply
    • sheepscreek 3 hours ago

      > "[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]"

      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.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • cratermoon an hour ago

    And there's at least an 80% chance one of those items is, in fact, not in the commit.

    Reply View 0 replies
WildGreenLeave 9 hours ago

It is missing the (to me) most important part. The reason why these changes are made.

Reply View 14 replies
  • _joel 3 hours ago

    Set a PR template up, that demands those sections are filled in. Could probably do that down to the commit level with pre-commit but realistically you'd want that level of detail in the in the PR. Also add issue id to the commits too, that way you can pull them up easily and get more context.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • jjcob 8 hours ago

    I hate it when I look at some code, wondering why I added a refresh call at that point, I do a git blame to find the commit message, and it says "add refresh call".

    Reply View 8 replies
    • rkomorn 7 hours ago

      But... I keep being told that commit messages are useless because the code is the documentation, so code diffs are self-explanatory...

      Reply View 7 replies
      • dspillett 7 hours ago

        That only works if the code is good enough to be the documentation. In DayJob prefer to cover all the bases:

        ∞ 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.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • rkomorn 6 hours ago

          > That only works if the code is good enough to be the documentation.

          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.

          Reply View 0 replies
      • cratermoon 43 minutes ago

        The code is the "how", sometimes it's necessary to explain the "why".

        Reply View 4 replies
  • darrenf 7 hours ago

    Isn't "Fix dynamic channel list" the reason?

    Reply View 0 replies
  • stpedgwdgfhgdd 8 hours ago

    True, you need to instruct the AI agents to include this.

    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.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • DaiPlusPlus 8 hours ago

      > you need to instruct the AI agents to include this.

      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.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • ffsm8 7 hours ago

        I think you're missing context.

        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)

        Reply View 0 replies
dspillett 7 hours ago

> - Tested locally and working correctly

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.

Reply View 0 replies
RestartKernel 9 hours ago

GitHub Copilot for one, and I'm pretty sure JetBrains' offering does the same.

Reply View 0 replies
lloydatkinson 9 hours ago

Every time I’ve tried to use AI for commit messages its designers couldn’t be bothered to get it to take into account previous commit messages.

I 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”.

Reply View 0 replies