Comment by mikepurvis
1 day ago
In my day job, I do a lot of AI coding but almost never have Claude actually create the PR titles or descriptions for me. It produces too much content, and the justification/background sections are often not quite right.
Most PRs to me are not coming out of nowhere anyway, rather they're "here's the linked issue, I started out addressing it by doing X and Y, but then Y got hairy so I switched to Z, hope that makes sense but happy to discuss further as well."
And most feedback is not "let's have you explain the design to me in a diff comment" but rather please explain this design in a code comment so that the next reader of the source will have your context.
Yeah I think this is a good approach. I’m pretty AI-optimistic when it comes to making code changes. But reading AI generated descriptions (including pull requests) is absolutely the worst. That content really needs to be human written. Not just for the benefit of the reader, but it also helps the writer exercise their understanding.
I think OSS maintainers are in the middle of intersecting trends:
- tough hiring market, especially for more Jr candidates
- the perception (true or not) that OSS contributions help get attention from recruiters
- LLMs making it very easy to generate “contributions”
i want to figure out some extra practice - get a step of claude sending me a PR, then me accepting it after review, and then rewriting the merge to be a new PR for general review