Comment by jbjbjbjb
10 hours ago
This command needs a warning. Using this command and drawing too many conclusions from it, especially if you’re new, will make you look stupid in front of your team mates.
I ran this on the repo I have open and after I filtered out the non code files it really can only tell me which features we worked on in the last year. It says more about how we decided to split up the features into increments than anything to do with bugs and “churn”.
Good thing that the article contains that warning, then.
Not really strong enough in a post about what to do in a codebase you’re not familiar with. In that situation you’re probably new to the team and organisation and likely to get off on the wrong foot with people if you assume their code “hurts”.
The post is “here’s what I do”, not “here’s what you should do and then confront the team about the results.” It’s just showing you a quick way to get some insights. It’s not even guaranteeing it’s accurate, just showing you some things you might be able to draw some quick conclusions on.
I’m not sure why HN attracts this need to poke holes in interesting observations to “prove” they aren’t actually interesting.
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I found it interesting, that Git itself has built in similarity notion... when it packs objects, it groups files by path+size, runs delta cmpression to find which are close.
Very different from just counting commits - https://vectree.io/c/delta-compression-heuristics-and-packfi...
These commands are just about what files to start looking at to understand new codebase.
Better for people to know they're just blindly copying tools and parroting their output as if it's automatically meaningfully. Any warning against that should be built into the individual, for their own sake
Right? Some of these comments feel “you gave me commands to run and I should be able to turn my brain off to interpret the outputs”. These aren’t newbie commands so the assumption would be that you kinda know what you’re doing at least a little bit. If not, then don’t run them… similar to how you should approach all commands/things from the internet