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Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
91–100 of 106 posts
Re: Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
#92With WhatTheCommit [1], I never have to come up with commit messages again. /s
I even wrote an IntelliJ IDEA plugin 9 years ago [2]. Half as a joke, half to learn about IDEA plugin development. I'm puzzled by seing so many people actually using it. Last month the HTTP link became invalid, and soon after someone opened a PR with a fix. I really hope noone actually uses those commit messages on shared repositories.
[1] https://whatthecommit.com/
[2] https://darekkay.com/blog/what-the-commit-plugin-for-intelli...
Re: Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right, and even if GPT-3 could summarize the thousand-line diff in a sensible way, without introducing any falsehoods, it would still be strictly worse than the developer writing a sentence explaining what they think they've accomplished with the commit. It's just the same thing as with comments and "self-documenting code". The code tells you what (and if written carefully, it may be even somewhat effective at it). I…
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Re: Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> … 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.
You can break a car into small pieces, but you won’t learn anything from a test drive if it doesn’t run.
Cars are not like software. The software should run at the initial stage N and at all subsequent stages N+X. If it doesn't and requires some large PR to continue working, you've got a fundamental problem there.
Re: Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
#95I don't want to debate the presence or absence of merits in this tool (these are extensively covered in other comments), but I want to point out that even in the demo examples 2 out of 3 commit messages are plainly incorrect:
- in Demo 1 tool wrote "Switch to colored output..." while in the diff we can see that colored output was already present;
- in Demo 3 tool wrote "Add installation options and demo link to README", while in the actuall diff we only see a link being added, no changes to installation options.
Props to the author for being honest and not cherry-picking the examples.
Re: Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
#96I 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…
In general I’m pretty skeptical of the ability to get anything deep out of these chat bots, but I think it is wrong to say that the generated commit message is worse than none. The programmer still read the generated message and OK’d it. So, it tells us something about their intent, in the sense that they thought the message summarized it sufficiently (or, they could just OK without reading it, but that’s just lying…
> The programmer still read the generated message and OK’d it.
You think? For some programmers writing commit messages is like ... i don't know because i'm not one of them... some kind of torture?. I bet the kind of person who likes this service would otherwise put in blank commit messages or at best ticket IDs.
Re: Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
A ChatGPT-generated message, pasted without editing, is purely functional transformation of the code, adding zero information. This means I could just as well run it on your diff myself , if I thought it would be useful. More than that, when I do it a year or two after you made your commit, the then-current ChatGPT will likely do a much better job at summarizing the change. So perhaps it's best to leave auto-summariz…
If the programmer checks and OKs the message, then it still conveys information that you don’t have a year or two down the line. ChatGPT is guessing what their intent was, it could guess wrong, but if it guesses right and they validate that guess, then their intent has been summarized.
A programmer checking and OKing the message only tells you they didn't think it's bad enough to expend effort correcting it.
ChatGPT can't correctly guess what the author's intent was, because that information is not contained in the code (exception: if the code includes a comment explaining the intent).
Re: Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not. The diff, which is the sole input to GPT-3 here, does not carry the causal context - that is, why the change was made. Nor does it carry the broader understanding necessary to summarize the what succinctly and accurately - things like high-level design terms that mostly exist on diagrams or in issue trackers, but not in the code itself. By adding those details in a commit message, the author can add extra i…
We could give the model access to JIRA, confluence, meeting transcripts etc. so that it has all the same contextual information as the developers.
You know what? You do that. I'm gonna start a SaaS business providing AI generators for code, commit messages and documentation. Models that take into account all the context to deliver more accurate, better results. All I need is a live feed from your JIRA, Confluence, Teams/Slack, Zoom, Exchange, SharePoint or whatever alternatives you use. This will guarantee you the biggest bang for your buck!
Elsewhere in this thread someone was wondering if sending a change diff to a fly-by-night third party SaaS could be leaking company IP. They were thinking too small.
But cynicism aside - giving the model access to all that contextual info would definitely increase the chances it would generate useful commit summaries. It would also increase chances it would generate much more convincing bullshit, full of just the right phrases to confuse your programmers, PMs and architects alike.
Re: Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something that's standard at the company I work for is commit messages always having the ticket number at the start, and it helps figure out why something was changed so much more than a commit message. Ex of a recent change I saw, but anonymized a bit. PROJ-12345: Added preview flag to video player PROJ-12345 in Jira: When a preview of a video is playing in the persistent player, preroll ads will display on app laun…
A more standardized format is: Bug: #12345 if you want to merely reference a specific bug/issue, or Closes: #12345 if this commit fixes the bug/closes the issue. See https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/CommitMessageConventio...
But the PROJ-12345 at the beginning of the first line of the commit is very common in many entreprise projects.
Re: Gptcommit: Never write a commit message again (with the help of GPT-3)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not. The diff, which is the sole input to GPT-3 here, does not carry the causal context - that is, why the change was made. Nor does it carry the broader understanding necessary to summarize the what succinctly and accurately - things like high-level design terms that mostly exist on diagrams or in issue trackers, but not in the code itself. By adding those details in a commit message, the author can add extra i…
I guess they could feed all of the team's Slack history into GPT as well and it would then have the context?
It could even continue filling Slack.