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".
So long as there are in fact those things, and so long as it didn't sneak something else in there at the same time, it being just on the knife-edge between sense and word-salad is better than "fix".
Buuuuuut far to often it says it fixed a bug I reported, when it only touched one superficial failure mode rather than the root cause.
Yesterday's issue: Why is zoom/pan randomly failing? It told me it was because it was applying a transformation matrix with every input and sometimes JavaScript gave it a non-invertible matrix (why?) which then propagated NaNs everywhere and you can't update a matrix filled with non-numbers.
Why was it doing that in the first place? Seems to be because it's too motivated to perform quick wins and not sufficiently motivated to do good engineering.
Good thing this was just a game editor. Spiky intelligence: superhuman on some dimensions, total noob on others.
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 ↗
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
So long as there are in fact those things, and so long as it didn't sneak something else in there at the same time, it being just on the knife-edge between sense and word-salad is better than "fix".
Buuuuuut far to often it says it fixed a bug I reported, when it only touched one superficial failure mode rather than the root cause.
Yesterday's issue: Why is zoom/pan randomly failing? It told me it was because it was applying a transformation matrix with every input and sometimes JavaScript gave it a non-invertible matrix (why?) which then propagated NaNs everywhere and you can't update a matrix filled with non-numbers.
Why was it doing that in the first place? Seems to be because it's too motivated to perform quick wins and not sufficiently motivated to do good engineering.
Good thing this was just a game editor. Spiky intelligence: superhuman on some dimensions, total noob on others.