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If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

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Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#141

Post by alainrk »

D-Machine wrote: post #101
alainrk wrote: post #95

My complete reasoning, notes, errors have never been part of the commit. I don't see a valid reason on why the raw conversation must be included. Rather I have hooks (or just "manually" invoked) to process all of it and update the relevant documentation that I've been putting under docs/.

If you also ensure the AI writes relevant (and correct) docs, and also code comments and commit message, then I agree there is not much need for extra info, e.g. prompts / session distillation. I am not sure that that is the case currently (though we might be getting there soon at least in some cases).

Agree with this, I've been testing how AGENTS.md and similar can do to automatically have these behaviours and I feel (it's just feeling) it's been improving over time. Clearly depends a lot on the agent, the model, the codebase size and so on.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#142

Post by refactor_master »

notedbrew wrote: post #124
827a wrote: post #94

IMO: This might be a contrarian opinion, but I don't think so. Its much the same problem as asking, for example, if every single line you write, or every function, becomes a commit. The answer to this granularity is, much like anything, you have to think of the audience: Who is served by persisting these sessions? I would suspect that there is little reason why future engineers, or future LLMs, would need access to t…

You ignore the reality of vibe coding. If someone just prompts and never reads the code and tests the result barely, then the prompts can be a valuable insight. But I am not rooting for either, just saying.

If A vibes, and B is overwhelmed with noise, how does B reliably go through it? If using AI, this necessarily faces the same problems that recording all A's actions was trying to solve in the first place, and we'd be stuck in a never-ending cycle.

We could also distribute the task to B, C, D, ... N actors, and assume that each of them would "cover" (i.e. understand) some part of A's output. But this suddenly becomes very labor intensive for other reasons, such as coordination and trust that all the reviewers cover adequately within the given time...

Or we could tell A that this is not a vibe playground and fire them.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#143

Post by micw »

IMO it depends a bit, but in most cases: No!

If you do proper software development (planing, spec, task breakdown, test case spec, implementation, unit test, acceptance test, ...) implementation is just a single step and the generated artifact is the source code. And that's what needs to be checked in. All the other artifacts are usually stored elsewhere.

If you do spec and planing with AI, you should also commit the outcome and maybe also the prompt and session (like a meeting note on a spec meeting). But it's a different artifact then.

But if you skip all the steps and put your idea directly to an coding agent in the hope that the result is a final, tested and production ready software, you should absolutely commit the whole chat session (or at least make the AI create a summary of it).

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#144

Post by ffsm8 »

micw wrote: post #143

IMO it depends a bit, but in most cases: No! If you do proper software development (planing, spec, task breakdown, test case spec, implementation, unit test, acceptance test, ...) implementation is just a single step and the generated artifact is the source code. And that's what needs to be checked in. All the other artifacts are usually stored elsewhere. If you do spec and planing with AI, you should also commit the…

LLMs frequently hallucinate and go off on wild goose chases. It's admittedly gotten a lot better, but it still happens.

From that perspective alone the session would be important meta information that could be used to determine the rationale of a commit - right from the intent (prompt) to what the harness (Claude code etc) made of it. So there is more value in keeping it even in your second scenario

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#145

Post by majormajor »

rzerowan wrote: post #122
827a wrote: post #94

IMO: This might be a contrarian opinion, but I don't think so. Its much the same problem as asking, for example, if every single line you write, or every function, becomes a commit. The answer to this granularity is, much like anything, you have to think of the audience: Who is served by persisting these sessions? I would suspect that there is little reason why future engineers, or future LLMs, would need access to t…

This is a central problem that weve already seen proliferate wildly in Scientific research , and currently if the same is allowed to be embedded in foundational code. The future outlook would be grim. Replication crisis[1]. Given initial conditions and even accounting for 'noise' would a LLm arrive at the same output.It should , for the same reason math problems require one to show their working. Scientific papers re…

You can leave commit messages or comments without spamming your history with every "now I'm inspecting this file..." or "oops, that actually works differently than I expected" transcript.

In fact, I'd wager that all that excess noise would make it harder to discern meaningful things in the future than simply distilling the meaningful parts of the session into comments and commit messages.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#146

Post by D-Machine »

alainrk wrote: post #141
D-Machine wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you also ensure the AI writes relevant (and correct) docs, and also code comments and commit message, then I agree there is not much need for extra info, e.g. prompts / session distillation. I am not sure that that is the case currently (though we might be getting there soon at least in some cases).

Agree with this, I've been testing how AGENTS.md and similar can do to automatically have these behaviours and I feel (it's just feeling) it's been improving over time. Clearly depends a lot on the agent, the model, the codebase size and so on.

Yup. Realistically there will always be simple changes that AI can handle completely (docs, comments, and commit message), and other changes where some human input will be hugely valuable.

Until then, it makes sense to automatically include some distillation of the AI generation process, by default, IMO.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#147

Post by willbeddow »

Increasingly, I'd like the code to live alongside a journal and research log. My workflow right now is spending most of my time in Obsidian writing design docs for features, and then manually managing claude sessions that I paste them back and forth into. I have a page in obsidian for each ongoing session, and I record my prompts, forked paths, thoughts on future directions, etc. It seems natural that at some point this (code, journal, LLM context) will all be unified.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#148

Post by slashdave »

solarkraft wrote: post #134
827a wrote: post #94

IMO: This might be a contrarian opinion, but I don't think so. Its much the same problem as asking, for example, if every single line you write, or every function, becomes a commit. The answer to this granularity is, much like anything, you have to think of the audience: Who is served by persisting these sessions? I would suspect that there is little reason why future engineers, or future LLMs, would need access to t…

I agree that probably not everything should be stored - it’s too noisy. But the reason the session is so interesting is precisely the later part of the conversation - all the corrections in the details, where the actual , more precise requirements crystallize.

Then just summarize the final requirements

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#149

Post by majormajor »

matchagaucho wrote: post #133
827a wrote: post #94

IMO: This might be a contrarian opinion, but I don't think so. Its much the same problem as asking, for example, if every single line you write, or every function, becomes a commit. The answer to this granularity is, much like anything, you have to think of the audience: Who is served by persisting these sessions? I would suspect that there is little reason why future engineers, or future LLMs, would need access to t…

For me, it’s about preserving optionality. If I can run resume {session_id} within 30 days of a file’s latest change, there’s a strong chance I’ll continue evolving that story thread—or at least I’ve removed the friction if I choose to.

It seems unlikely that a file that hasn't changed in 30 days in an environment with a lot of "agents" cranking away on things is going to be particularly meaningful to revisit with the context from 30 days ago, vs using new context with everything that's been changed and learned since then.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#150

Post by majormajor »

dang wrote: post #51

I floated that idea a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096202 , although I used the word "prompts" which users pointed out was obsolete. "Session" seems better for now. The objections I heard, which seemed solid, are (1) there's no single input to the AI (i.e. no single session or prompt) from which such a project is generated, (2) the back-and-forth between human and AI isn't exactly like working wit…

> But the status quo isn't great because these projects, at the moment, are mostly not that interesting. What's needed is some kind of support to make them more interesting.

IMO it's not the lack of context that makes them uninteresting. It's the fact that the bar for "this took effort and thought to make" has moved, so it's just a lot easier to make things that we would've considered interesting two years ago.

If you're asking HN readers to sift through additional commit history or "session transcripts" in order to decide if it's interesting, because there's a lot of noise, you've already failed. There's gonna be too much noise to make it worth that sifting. The elevator pitch is just gonna need to be that much different from "vibe coded thing X" in order for a project to be worth much.

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