Comment by yorwba
3 days ago
"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
That’s a good one. And yes, of course I mean its history of usage in computing, not in general.
"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.
It's a fairly good concise term ... load-bearing, even. /ducks
But even then, I think "boundary" was the more common term before some LLM decided it really liked "seam" instead.
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Yes, and I prefer that term because no one but claude ever talks to me using the word seam every other paragraph.
I have instructions which is confidently ignores to never use seam and instead say interface.
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.