alt Hacker NewsIn our experience, it's difficult to create well-mannered commits as you code and new ideas pop into your head or you iterate on different designs (even for LLMs). One concept we toyed around with was telling an LLM to re-do a branch using "perfect commits" right before putting up a PR. But even then you might discover new edge cases and have to tack them on as additional commits.
We thought git wasn't the right level of abstraction and decided to tackle things at the PR level instead. Curious to hear your experiences!
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> But even then you might discover new edge cases and have to tack them on as additional commits.
Have you heard about `rebase -i` ?
> We thought git wasn't the right level of abstraction and decided to tackle things at the PR level instead. Curious to hear your experiences!
The frick is a PR abstraction? Is this a GitHub PR abstraction where the commits are squashed and the PR description is whatever was hallucinated at 5 am? Yes, that’s certainly an abstraction, aka loss of information.
You either have the information stored in the version control database or you don’t. You can curate and digest information but once it’s lost it’s lost.
People layering stuff on top of Git or Subversion makes no sense. Your AI is not so dainty and weak that it cannot write a commit message. And if it can’t then you can recuperate the information that you trashed.
> In our experience, it's difficult to create well-mannered commits
Sure, it is. But it's worth it, not just for code review, but for a myriad other things: bisect, blame, log, etc.
Your tool makes one thing (the code review) easier, while decreasing people's motivation to make well-mannered commits, thus making everything else (bisect etc) worse.
I'm sure it's net positive in some cases, and I think it's net negative in other cases.