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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?

#71

Post by midnitewarrior »

mandel_x wrote: post #44
midnitewarrior wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already invented this in my head, thanks for not making me code it. Excellent idea, I just wish GitHub would show notes. You also risk losing those notes if you rebase the commit they are attached to, so make sure you only attach the notes to a commit on main.

I added an action that will add a comment with the notes in GitHub so that you can see them directly. I did work around squash to collect all sessions and concatenate them as a single one

Well done.

There is so much undefined in how agentic coding is going to mature. Something like what you're doing will need to be a part of it. Hopefully this makes some impressions and pushes things forward.

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

#72

Post by rerdavies »

danhergir wrote: post #5

One of the use cases i see for this tool is helping companies to understand the output coming from the llm blackbox and the process which the employee took to complete a certain task

Except it doesn't capture the majority of uses of AI, in my experience. In my current practice, the the vast majority of AI use is autocompletions, or small inline prompts. ("Fix this error."; "Open an ALSA midi connection" (things that avoid a to trip into awful documentation); "if (one of the query parameters is "gear='ir') ..." (things that break flow by forcing a trip into excellent but overly verbose Javascript URL API documentation)). Only very occasionally will I prompt for a big chunk of code.

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

#74

Post by saratogacx »

I've gotten into the habit of having the LLM produce a description of their process and summarize the change, Than I add that along with the model I used after my own commit message. It lets me know where I use AI and what I thought it did as well as what I thought it did.

The entire prompt and process would be fine if my git history was subject to research but really it is a tool for me or anyone else who wants to know what happened at a given time.

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

#75

Post by what »

mock-possum wrote: post #70

I’ve had the same thought, but after playing around with it, it just seems like adding noise. I never find myself looking at generated code and wondering “what prompt lead to that?” There’s no point, I won’t get any kind of useful response - I’m better off talking to the developer who committed it, that’s how code review works.

The developer that committed won’t know because they didn’t write it…

You can avoid the noise with git notes. Add the session as a note on the commit. No one has to read them if they’re not interested.

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

#76

Post by killingtime74 »

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…

Also the models change all the time and are not deterministic

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

#78

Post by xhcuvuvyc »

daemonk wrote: post #30

I did this in the beginning and realized I never went back to it. I think we have to learn to embrace the chaos. We can try to place a couple of anchors in the search space by having Claude summarize the code base every once in a while, but I am not sure if even that is necessary. The code it writes is git versioned and is probably enough to go on.

Just get it to write more comments about reasoning as you go.

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

#79

Post by D-Machine »

Obviously yes, at least if not the prompts in the session, some simple / automated distillation of those prompts. Code generated by AI is already clearly not going to be reviewed as carefully as code produced by humans, and intentions / assumptions will only be documented in AI-generated comments to some limited degree, completely contingent on the prompt(s).

Otherwise, when fixing a bug, you just risk starting from scratch and wasting time using the same prompts and/or assumptions that led to the issue in the first place.

Much of the reason code review was/is worth the time is because it can teach people to improve, and prevent future mistakes. Code review is not really about "correctness", beyond basic issues, because subtle logic errors are in general very hard to spot; that is covered by testing (or, unfortunately, deployment surprises).

With AI, at least as it is currently implemented, there is no learning, as such, so this removes much of the value of code review. But, if the goal is to prevent future mistakes, having some info about the prompts that led to the code at least brings some value back to the review process.

EDIT: Also, from a business standpoint, you still need to select for competent/incompetent prompters/AI users. It is hard to do so when you have no evidence of what the session looked like. Also, how can you teach juniors to improve their vibe-coding if you can't see anything about their sessions?

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

#80

Post by tempestn »

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…

Why does the regular voting system fail here? Are there just too many Show HNs for people to process the new ones, so the good ones get lost in the noise?
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