Comment by infinitebit
20 hours ago
THANK YOU. I’ve always felt this way about PR review. I feel like people should write a natural language description of the change, and every section of it should link to part of the diff, and every part of the diff should be linked to by part of the description. That or just leave a comment on every chunk of the diff.
You might have use for an issue tracker I've been building the past year and a half. It lets you inspect diffs inline in the ticket, and replay the board to see how the workflow evolved over time via a timeline scrubber.
https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/
It stores issues as an immutable event log in your repo, so you can go back and inspect the context behind a change without having to litter the code with comments. Helps with traceability of intent.
A proper natural language description of the change without links to parts of the diffs is already advanced material.
And arguably if the description needs linking to parts of the diffs then the commit is too large?
This sounds like a fussier version of what Donald Knuth was doing with literate programming.
Which, incidentally, is a really enjoyable way to work.
People in my team are generating long and verbose PR descriptions with AI. No idea why and for whom. I certainly never read any of them.
Man I'm so sick of seeing 50-line PRs with 800 lines of AI slop markdown files included. I also don't read them.