Comment by waldarbeiter
3 days ago
Thank you, my dict.cc search history contains exactly some of these words. I felt like my english got much worse but when Claude kept talking about "hunk" over and over I felt like the problem is maybe not on my end.
"hunk" is git terminology. When you use `git add --patch` (which you probably should, if you use `git add` at all) you get prompted "Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,e,?]?" which is self-explanatory (?) and the hunk refers to whatever change git is highlighting at the moment.
I wondered how far back the usage of that term went. I was familiar with it in patch, so I did a little digging and found it in the v1.3 (1985!) source by Larry Wall: https://groups.google.com/g/mod.sources/c/xSQM63e39YY
You need to go back a few more hundreds of years, hunk is an old term that just means "small piece of something larger".
It has been in common usage in computing since long before 1985 .. for a really interesting and obscure way hunk has been used:
https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/hunks.html
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"seam" is apparently... according to Claude itself a term from 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' by Michael Feathers which I have not read. All it took was for one sub agent to use this term and it stated using it everywhere all the time. I have not read the book and prefer other terminology but it only takes 1 sub-agent or 1 usage in the context before it poisons everything else.
That's funny. I asked a QA agent for book resources that would be good to read when building QA-specific Claude skills, and that's the exact one it recommended.
An interface is an example of a seam in regular code. It's basically what forms architectural shapes that you can depend on for both design and testing.
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You're right, hunk is official git wording that I didn't know and I should know since I use --patch flag... It's just that I never heard a human (including online) reason about hunks. While at the same time (from my observation) people say things like code chunk, code snippet etc. a lot.
This is the problem with commercial AI and the way our minds work; it writes garbage and we’re trained to think we’re stupid because we can’t understand it.