This would sound insane to me from two years ago but I have recently started insisting on writing all my own commit messages and pull request descriptions. I do usually have an agent review them for factual accuracy, but not rephrase them.
It slows things down a bit, but in the best possible way. It has helped immensely to improve the depth of my understanding of the agent-generated code. When agents are doing everything its way too easy to “skim” diffs and not really absorb them.
I always prided myself on my technical writing, and commit messages and PRs were a great place to hone that skill. I found that I missed it and my work is better now I’ve reclaimed that part of my old job back.
A big win of LLMs in my book is the absolute reduction of commit messages with just “fixes” or “updates”. Commit messages have become more meaningful and useful, even if far from perfect.
We have one dev who uses LLMs to write the code, but still commits by hand. Most of his messages are of the type above, and none of them are useful.
I'm not sure that Claude's "Realigned the shape of the load-bearing ownership gate to reduce the blast radius of the design contract; confirmed, not assumed" is more meaningful than "fix".
Mildly disagree. "Fix" is exasperating but immediately tells me I need to look at the diff. With unconstrained Claude spew, I need to wade through three levels of deep fried LLM-speak before realizing...I need to look at the diff
"Deep fried" is the perfect analogy. LLMs have been trained on themselves so many times that their output is the linguistic equivalent of many rounds of JPEG compression.
I don't get this thread. Just tell the agent to use conventional commit messages and to keep it nice and tight. Are you all just raw dogging agent output with no alignment/conventions?
> Just tell the agent to use conventional commit messages and to keep it nice and tight.
I have this in my claude.md along with guidance on (not) writing comments but it’s still dumps multi-paragraph comments of Claude speak everywhere.
I think a lot of us are talking past eachother, but what I and I think others are complaining about is doing things well, and being minimal. LLMs don’t really do that yet, they can’t look at and simplify a codebase well, even with guidance. They always seem to add rather than subtract. And eventually it becomes an issue. I think they were actually better in this regard with like Opus 4.8, and are now getting even worse (but score better, and are more autonomous).
At home I use Codex, and it’s better as far as language goes at least.
Anyway, it’s like the logic piece necessary to do good work is still missing, and hurt by recent reinforcement fine-tuning. And it leads to massive bloat since more comments = higher scores, but walls of text and the tokens (or cognition if you’re the sad human reading them) aren’t free.
semiquaver · · focus · HN ↗
It slows things down a bit, but in the best possible way. It has helped immensely to improve the depth of my understanding of the agent-generated code. When agents are doing everything its way too easy to “skim” diffs and not really absorb them.
I always prided myself on my technical writing, and commit messages and PRs were a great place to hone that skill. I found that I missed it and my work is better now I’ve reclaimed that part of my old job back.
LeafItAlone · · focus · HN ↗
We have one dev who uses LLMs to write the code, but still commits by hand. Most of his messages are of the type above, and none of them are useful.
this_user · · focus · HN ↗
0x696C6961 · · focus · HN ↗
ericbarrett · · focus · HN ↗
atif089 · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
atif089 · · focus · HN ↗
bitwize · · focus · HN ↗
danielbln · · focus · HN ↗
ericbarrett · · focus · HN ↗
rudedogg · · focus · HN ↗
I have this in my claude.md along with guidance on (not) writing comments but it’s still dumps multi-paragraph comments of Claude speak everywhere.
I think a lot of us are talking past eachother, but what I and I think others are complaining about is doing things well, and being minimal. LLMs don’t really do that yet, they can’t look at and simplify a codebase well, even with guidance. They always seem to add rather than subtract. And eventually it becomes an issue. I think they were actually better in this regard with like Opus 4.8, and are now getting even worse (but score better, and are more autonomous).
At home I use Codex, and it’s better as far as language goes at least.
Anyway, it’s like the logic piece necessary to do good work is still missing, and hurt by recent reinforcement fine-tuning. And it leads to massive bloat since more comments = higher scores, but walls of text and the tokens (or cognition if you’re the sad human reading them) aren’t free.
burnished · · focus · HN ↗