Comment by amarant
2 months ago
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
2 months ago
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.
Ticket systems are quite ephemeral. I still have access to commit messages from the 90s (and I didn't work on the software at the time). I haven't been able to track the contents of the gnats bug tracker from those days.
And of course tickets can be private, so even if the data survived migration, you may not have access to it (principle of least privilege and all that).
1 reply →
Not really about design, but technical reasons why this solution came to be when it’s not that obvious. It’s not often needed. And when it does, it usually fits in a short paragraph.
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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.