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Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

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Re: Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

#111

Post by klodolph »

eli wrote: post #34
klodolph wrote: post #21

I may be missing something, but this is exactly what I want as a default. I want the session links there. I see PRs from my coworkers with session links. I still get to control whether other people can see the session, but I don’t lose it. I don’t get the “unprofessional” argument. This is attribution. Attribution is professional. If you don’t want it, you turn it off or rewrite the commit messages. If you are having…

It’s a default that changed silently during an automatic update. Also I frequently use an LLM to commit work that I have written. It is just misleading in that case.

I think it’s foreseeable that if you use the LLM to commit work you’ve written, it might cause problems with attribution.

In general I assume that attribution to AI is approximate. People copy-paste things out of chats and those don’t get attributed to the AI. And on the flip side, I’ve had AI write a commit, and then I’ve reverted it and written something different by hand (and it got tagged with an LLM session).

The AI attribution is approximate and informative. The commit message and authorship are the more important parts.

You may be concerned that people will think your commits are LLM-generated. I’m sorry that you have to work in that environment, but I don’t work in an environment like that and I don’t share your concerns.

Re: Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

#112

Post by lanyard-textile »

The major problem I see with these are linkrot. Do any of us truly believe these links will work 30 years from now?

Post IPO, many years down the line, a leadership that is eager to cut costs will look at their storage usage and expire 7 year old non-training sessions. Quickest thing to go. I have zero faith in any successful provider getting this right.

Git is supposed to be the durable storage medium, self containing and weathering the passage of time. Now we're littering the repos with a bunch of URLs that are only helpful in the short term.

Re: Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

#113

Post by jpc0 »

oniony wrote: post #90
ericyd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure i see it as an ad. "Sent from my iPhone" is an ad because the iPhone is not a meaningful part of sending the email. Claude is a meaningful part of the commit though if you're using it, so to me it's more like clarity or transparency than an advertisement.

My spade is a meaningful part of digging a hole when I plant a tree, but I still don't want a "Spear and Jackson" sign on my tree when I'm done.

There has been more than I project where I literally didn’t even look at the code.

I prompted what amounts to verbose “I want X” and then did QA. I’m perfectly happy with an LLM being credited with that code and there being no copyright existing for that code.

For some people that is their life’s work and they want to clutch pearls. Their sole contribution was a half baked idea and they shipped QA out to their “users” but they want to be credited with any rights.

There is definitely a continuum in LLM usage for code, do I agree with an AI blindly stamping every commit, not really.

Do I see LLM generated code as equivalent to me digging a hole with a shovel, it depends. Sometimes there was very little shovelling, other times there was no me involved and you may as well credit the entire hole to the shovel.

Where this will come in is when it comes to copyright and licensing.

If your entire product is LLM generated you sure as hell have no right to place any license on there other than potentially a MIT equivalent license, even that is dubious though but from an organisational standpoint MIT probably will be more widely accepted than saying it is uncopyrightable.

My argument being I would rather know that you didn’t even look at the code, which is what this will achieve, whether I agree with it or not at the very least it will make it easier to sift through the garbage.

Re: Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

#114

Post by sanex »

I can't believe how many people are in favor of it. Like it's so positive in the comments I'd think it's astroturfing. The code is the result of my work however it got done, and if I don't document or explain it well enough then that's a separate issue. Did you want to see my slack messages to my mentor too? Or how about all the stack overflows I read? Maybe I should voice record all the times I swore about Gary the junior dev not documenting something? It's plenty obvious when the code is AI written it's probably just safe to assume 95% of things have been at least AI assisted. Just look at the drop in SO volume, we're not writing less code we're writing more (rip GitHub uptime).

Re: Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

#115

Post by alasano »

vorticalbox wrote: post #102
klodolph wrote: post #21

I may be missing something, but this is exactly what I want as a default. I want the session links there. I see PRs from my coworkers with session links. I still get to control whether other people can see the session, but I don’t lose it. I don’t get the “unprofessional” argument. This is attribution. Attribution is professional. If you don’t want it, you turn it off or rewrite the commit messages. If you are having…

Why not use something like openspec? You get the benefits of context without a whole conversation to read. https://openspec.dev/

I use and love openspec and I'm against this session attribution by default setting.

But I do see the value in seeing the conversation that lead to the spec. I make sure that all product decisions go through me prior to the agent writing the spec and the questions I ask and decisions I make could definitely help understand retroactively why something is the way it is.

I guess with the default openspec schema you wouldn't have that but you could customize it or create your own in which the reasoning is encoded fully.

Re: Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

#116

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

otterley wrote: post #110
DarmokTanagra wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like "code generator IDE plugins". There are hundreds of them for just about every IDE you can think of. I can't tell if this is a serious question or not, but metaprogramming/generators are decades old concepts that have been common features of basically every IDE since the 90s.

That’s not what we’re talking about, though. That’s mechanical transformation, and isn’t the same thing as code that’s generated on demand from scratch, based on plain-language intent. Surely you know the difference, right? I assume you’ve used LLMs to generate code by now?

And what is the good old autocomplete feature? Do you attribute it authorship, too?

Is a series of matrix multiplications on a token vector not a mechanical transformation?

Where is the point where you start to anthropomorphize it?

Re: Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

#117

Post by alasano »

joshstrange wrote: post #13

I don't see any issue with this at all. I noticed it the other day and thought it was convenient. The same way I let the agent tag the PRs/commits with its name. I want to know what was used, in fact I wish it would identify the model used. I'm not embarrassed by my LLM usage and I want to provide a full audit trail whenever possible to aid myself in the future. PS: Claude archives old conversations on your computer…

I'd like to know what was used but "Co-authored by Claude Code" doesn't do anything except marketing for Anthropic.

The sessions are definitely more useful but only if I'm using a single agent from a single provider.

Re: Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

#118

Post by otterley »

0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #116
otterley wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what we’re talking about, though. That’s mechanical transformation, and isn’t the same thing as code that’s generated on demand from scratch, based on plain-language intent. Surely you know the difference, right? I assume you’ve used LLMs to generate code by now?

And what is the good old autocomplete feature? Do you attribute it authorship, too? Is a series of matrix multiplications on a token vector not a mechanical transformation? Where is the point where you start to anthropomorphize it?

That’s a great question, and is why we have these debates, and have courts to adjudicate disputes. I don’t have all the answers, but the gap between these different behaviors seems pretty wide to me.

Autocomplete doesn’t really work until you start typing. The fact that my phone recognizes that I’m starting to type a word and the IDE offers the most statistically likely choice for me to accept doesn’t make those words its own. Same with autocomplete on a phone or in a word processor when entering sentences.

FWIW the Copyright Office, for its part, recognizes that AI generated code is mechanically generated and its opinion is that it’s not copyrightable.

But that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about attribution and when it becomes important. To me the metaprogramming/codegen case is different because of the nature of the mechanism, particularly if you wrote the inputs that the IDE transformed on your behalf.

Re: Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

#119

Post by nonethewiser »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #68
nonethewiser wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Over relied on and far less clear than alternatives 99% of the time. Claude is a shitty English writer that is only tolerated for it’s coding ability.

Nah, "provenance" is a good word to know. Plain English version would be, "what colour are your bits?".

Good word to know, yes. Best word to use, no.

If you know “origin” or “source” and those words suffice, using a word that means the same thing but you don’t know is strictly worse for communication.

So if Claude is writing a novel, maybe provenance is the best word to use at times. If its a codebase README or variable name, its usually not.

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