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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?

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by what I've seen recently, 100% LLM code is often buggy and not that great. I'd say code quality truly matters in all domains

What a utopia, where code quality matters in all domains! In my opinion nearly the opposite is true: modern business solves for the "minimum viable quality". What is the absolute lowest quality the software can be and not tank the business.

> What a utopia, where code quality matters in all domains!

It does. The degree may not, though.

"We have a threshold of at least 5 hours total uptime every 24 hours" is still a quality bar, even if it is different to "We have a threshold of 99.99% uptime per year".

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

#302

The way I write code with AI is that I start with a project.md file, where I describe what I want done. I then ask it to make a plan.md file from that project.md to describe the changes it will make (or what it will create if Greenfield). I then iterate on that plan.md with the AI until it's what I want. I then ask it to make a detailed todo list from the plan.md and attach it to the end of plan.md. Once I'm fully sa…

Then you might like to look into automaker.

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

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by what I've seen recently, 100% LLM code is often buggy and not that great. I'd say code quality truly matters in all domains

What a utopia, where code quality matters in all domains! In my opinion nearly the opposite is true: modern business solves for the "minimum viable quality". What is the absolute lowest quality the software can be and not tank the business.

Maybe you're different, but I prefer to write code that at least attempts to be performant, tidy and readable, as well as working at least 90% of the time. Maybe I don't achieve perfection, but I try to care about the quality of what I write

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

#305
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…

> it's foolish to fight the future

And yet, the premise of the question assumes that it's possible in this case.

Historically having produced a piece of software to accomplish some non-trivial task implied weeks, months, or more of developing expertise and painstakingly converting that expertise into a formulation of the problem precise enough to run on a computer.

One could reasonably assume that any reasonable-looking submission was in fact the result of someone putting in the time to refine their understanding of the problem, and express it in code. By discussing the project one could reasonably hope to learn more about their understanding of the problem domain, or about the choices they made when reifying that understanding into an artifact useful for computation.

Now that no longer appears to be the case.

Which isn't to say there's no longer any skill involved in producing well engineered software that continues to function over time. Or indeed that there aren't classes of software that require interesting novel approaches that AI tooling can't generate. But now anyone with an idea, some high level understanding of the domain, and a few hundred dollars a month to spend, can write out a plan can ask an AI provider to generate them software to implement that plan. That software may or may not be good, but determining that requires a significant investment of time.

That change fundamentally changes the dynamics of "Show HN" (and probably much else besides).

It's essentially the same problem that art forums had with AI-generated work. Except they have an advantage: people generally agree that there's some value to art being artisan; the skill and effort that went into producing it are — in most cases — part of the reason people enjoy consuming it. That makes it rather easy to at least develop a policy to exclude AI, even if it's hard to implement in practice.

But the most common position here is that the value of software is what it does. Whilst people might intellectually prefer 100 lines of elegant lisp to 10,000 lines of spaghetti PHP to solve a problem, the majority view here is that if the latter provides more economic value — e.g. as the basis of a successful business — then it's better.

So now the cost of verifying things for interestingness is higher than the cost of generating plausibly-interesting things, and you can't even have a blanket policy that tries to enforce a minimum level of effort on the submitter.

To engage with the original question: if one was serious about extracting the human understanding from the generated code, one would probably take a leaf from the standards world where the important artifact is a specification that allows multiple parties to generate unique, but functionally equivalent, implementations of an idea. In the LLM case, that would presumably be a plan detailed enough to reliably one-shot an implementation across several models.

However I can't see any incentive structure that might cause that to become a common practice.

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

#306
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mthurman pointed me to https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/claude-code-mic... - is that what you have in mind?

Yeah! That’s great. Having those alongside vibe coded apps would make them way more interesting.

I've been tinkering away on one of these myself, https://rockstar.ninja. I expect there are a hundred others out there, going to be interesting to see what the end shape of these tools is.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by what I've seen recently, 100% LLM code is often buggy and not that great. I'd say code quality truly matters in all domains

What a utopia, where code quality matters in all domains! In my opinion nearly the opposite is true: modern business solves for the "minimum viable quality". What is the absolute lowest quality the software can be and not tank the business.

If you could prove what "minimum viable quality" actually was this would be true. We have standards and procedures exactly because it is unknowable. One engineers idea of "good enough" might bankrupt the business.

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

#308
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 think this too. I use the initial spec from the issue tracker as the prompt and work from there.

The missteps the agent takes and the nudging I do along the way are ephemeral, and new models and tooling will behave differently.

If you have the original prompt and the diff you have everything you need.

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

#309
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…

While it's noisy and complicated for humans to read through, this session info is primarily for future AI to read and use as additional input for their tasks. We could have LLMs ingest all these historical sessions, and use them as context for the current session. Basically treat the current session as an extension of a much, much longer previous session. Plus, future models might be able to "understand" the limitati…

But AI can just read the diff. The natural language isn't important.

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

#310
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the noise you mention, I wonder if memento's use of the git 'notes' feature is an acceptable way to contain or quarantine that noise. It might still not add much value, but at least it would live in a separate place that is easily filtered out when the user judges it irrelevant. Per the README of the linked repo, > It runs a commit and then stores a cleaned markdown conversation as a git note on the new com…

You are 100% and that’s why I chose git notes. If you do not sync them you have no knowledge of their existence.

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