Comment by dkenyser
2 months ago
> my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human"...
"Write commit messages as a human developer would — describe only what the code change does."
2 months ago
> my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human"...
"Write commit messages as a human developer would — describe only what the code change does."
That seems desirable? Like that's what commit messages are for. Describing the change. Much rather that than the m$ way of putting ads in commit messages
The commit message should complement the code. Ideally, what the code does should not need a separate description, but of course there can be exceptions. Usually, it's more interesting to capture in the commit message what is not in the code: the reason why this approach was chosen and not some other obvious one. Or describe what is missing, and why it isn't needed.
That sounds like design discussions best had in the issue/ticket itself, before you even start writing code. Then the commit message references the ticket and has a brief summary of the changes.
Writing and reading paragraphs of design discussion in a commit message is not something that seems common.
11 replies →
It sounds like if you are vibe-coding, that is, can't even be arsed to write a simple commit message, your commit message should be your prompt.
Unfortunately GitHub Copilot’s commit message generation feature is very human. It’s picked up some awful habits from lazy human devs. I almost always get some pointless “… to improve clarity” or “… for enhanced usability” at the end of the message.
VS Code has a setting that promises to change the prompt it uses to generate commit messages, but it mostly ignores my instructions, even very literal ones like “don’t use the words ‘enhance’ or ‘improve’”. And oddly having it set can sometimes result in Cyrillic characters showing up at the end of the message.
Ultimately I stopped using it, because editing the messages cost me more time than it saved.
/rant
Honestly the aggressive verbosity of github copilot is half the reason don't use its suggested comments. AI generated code comments follow an inverted-wadsworth-constant: Only the first 30% is useful.
As opposed to outputting debugging information, which I wouldnt be surprised if LLMs do output "debug" output blurbs which could include model specific information.
~That line isn't in the file I linked, care to share the context? Seems pretty innocuous on its own.~
[edit] Never mind, find in page fail on my end.
It's in line 56-57.
Thanks! I must have had a typo when I searched the page.
The human developer would just write what the code does, because the commit also contains an email address that identifies who wrote the commit. There's no reason to write:
> Commit f9205ab3 by dkenyser on 2026-3-31 at 16:05:
> Fixed the foobar bug by adding a baz flag - dkenyser
Because it already identified you in the commit description. The reason to add a signature to the message is that someone (or something) that isn't you is using your account, which seems like a bad idea.
Aside from merges that combine commits from many authors onto a production branch or release tag. I would personally not leave an agent to do that sort of work.
I usually avoid merge commits in favor of rebases precisely for the reason you describe above.