Kenton Varda Bans AI-Written Commit Messages and PR Descriptions
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@simonw I really feel this. I like agentic dev but the PR descriptions they generate are such slop, I have to go though multiple prompt iterations or manually rewrite them to not feel bad about showing them to colleagues. (But maybe sharing understanding with other humans is outdated?)
@simonw The worst part about this is that GPT 4o wrote better commit messages than 90% developers.
I've been letting Claude and GLT-5.5 write almost all of my commit messages recently, but I don't feel great about it "omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing" is definitely the key problem there https://twitter.com/kentonvarda/status/2074924213983740233
Sometimes they DO attempt to do that but guess the rationale incorrectly, which is worse than not adding no a rationale at all I do try to link commits back to issues though, which are written by me and provide a much better answer to the reason behind a change