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.
Sometimes minimal information is better than extrapolated information, especially when the extrapolation mentally painful to read and has decent probability of being wrong with inaccuracies that waste people's time.
Also:
1. It's often a premature extrapolation from diffs and tickets which you could probably generate later, at need, and likely with even better results.
2. If those commit messages can ever influence future work, then it's just carcinogenic cargo-cult cruft. Pruning outputs (future inputs) is important to prevent weird unwanted drift.
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.
Terr_ · · focus · HN ↗
Also:
1. It's often a premature extrapolation from diffs and tickets which you could probably generate later, at need, and likely with even better results.
2. If those commit messages can ever influence future work, then it's just carcinogenic cargo-cult cruft. Pruning outputs (future inputs) is important to prevent weird unwanted drift.