[HN Gopher] Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with ...
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       Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of
       GPT-3)
        
       Author : zurawiki
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2023-01-19 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (zura.wiki)
 (TXT) w3m dump (zura.wiki)
        
       | SketchySeaBeast wrote:
       | I can kind of understand getting help writing the description of
       | a large PR. But a commit message? Whose commits are so long so
       | often that they need the help of an AI assistant to come up with
       | the contents?
        
         | deathanatos wrote:
         | Heh... there are really two types of coders. Those who things
         | commits should have a single, obvious, minimal purpose, and who
         | will split off unrelated changes into separate commits...
         | 
         | ... and those who tag you as a reviewer on +8,298, -1,943
         | commits/PRs with the commit message "JIRA-PROJ-84138".
        
           | satvikpendem wrote:
           | > _... and those who tag you as a reviewer on +8,298, -1,943
           | commits /PRs with the commit message "JIRA-PROJ-84138"._
           | 
           | At my workplaces, we've told people who do this to break up
           | their larger commit into smaller ones before reviewing. If
           | they haven't done that initially, well, their life is going
           | to get harder for a few days.
        
       | NBJack wrote:
       | Neat concept, but this opens up a can of worms for corporate
       | security. Pretty sure I won't get approval to submit proprietary
       | code to a third party service just because I was too lazy to
       | write a few lines of text. Might be helpful to open source
       | projects?
        
         | xrd wrote:
         | Just add fully homomorphic encryption.
         | 
         | I agree with you, but I'm assuming this could just send a diff
         | and that context would be small enough to not leak.
         | 
         | Then again, if GPT can keep track of all the diffs...
        
       | xrd wrote:
       | Now do this for branching strategies.
       | 
       | This is amazing. Humans should only need to read commit messages,
       | never write them.
        
       | ketralnis wrote:
       | I don't really ever want to read answers from GPT to questions
       | that I didn't knowingly myself ask GPT. If GPT can write a commit
       | message from you, don't write it at all and let me ask it that if
       | that's what I want. It may be a positive to you to spend a few
       | seconds less on commit messages but it's a net negative for the
       | world for it to become polluted with vast amounts of flatly
       | incorrect text with no knowledge as to its provenance.
       | 
       | Put another way, you asking GPT for stuff that it learned from
       | Stack Overflow: good. Using it to post to Stack Overflow: bad.
        
         | dheera wrote:
         | Except for startups when commit messages are more like "asdf",
         | "aoeu", or "demo" because some investor barged in and demanded
         | a demo before they would wire funds.
        
       | pachico wrote:
       | I find commit messages have more value when they don't just
       | repeat what you can see by looking at a diff but when they
       | explain the reasons behind.
        
         | jart wrote:
         | The point of a summarization model is if you have a thousand
         | line change, it helps to have a one sentence explanation of
         | what it is. The demo videos the author used here really don't
         | do a good job communicating that, because the summary GPT-3
         | wrote for his one line commit was longer than the commit
         | itself.
        
         | ape4 wrote:
         | I was hoping GPT-3 was going to give the reasons
        
           | waynesonfire wrote:
           | yeah and find the bugs.
        
             | BoorishBears wrote:
             | I've had ChatGPT find some pretty esoteric bugs in ways
             | that shocked me.
             | 
             | Like semi-jokingly asking it to "improve" some code
             | thinking it'd come up with some non obvious control flow...
             | then instead having it immediately point out a subtle bug
             | along the lines of "the code sets flag A instead of setting
             | flag B on <insert line>" flag B wasn't even unused, so it's
             | not like a simple unused variable heuristic would have
             | caught that.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | abi wrote:
       | If you're looking for a Python variant of this tool:
       | https://github.com/abi/autocommit
        
       | smashedtoatoms wrote:
       | Because what we need is more of the what was done, with no regard
       | to the why. Why provide any context as to why the change was made
       | when you can fill it with an AI description of what one could
       | accurately tell by looking at the code? I kinda can't believe
       | this isn't a joke. Just squash it to the emoji that best captures
       | the sentiment! Why use the tool to enhance you and your peers
       | lives, when you can use AI to make it pointless!
        
       | FastEatSlow wrote:
       | Perhaps this could be more useful if it could be fed information
       | from a bug tracker, so it could use the context to create a
       | meaningful (if inaccurate) commit message.
        
       | haney wrote:
       | This is interesting but I'd hate to work on a project where this
       | was used. Commits should tell me why a change happened not just
       | what code changed.
        
       | warkanlock wrote:
       | The peak of human society right here
        
       | yowlingcat wrote:
       | * * *
        
       | jupp0r wrote:
       | This is horrible. Commit messages should contain the reason why
       | this change has been made and not imprecise prose summaries of
       | what the diff looks like.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-19 23:00 UTC)