alt Hacker News> But you probably haven't spent time writing commit messages before a branch is finished.
Wrong. With jj, I use `jj describe` before I start work. It is like writing out a plan for what I want to do.
> Or, if you have, you've quite potentially just wasted time writing something that will be rewritten anyway as things change.
Rewriting it is not wasted time. It is an opportunity to look at what I have written in the plan and check whether I have really executed them, and then rephrase things to be more easily understandable.
> Restricted and summarized is good - easier to find/remember, less fluff in a list.
The first line of a commit message is already a summary of the work done. And you can use actual English instead of trying to awkwardly avoid spaces in your words.
> It is like writing out a plan for what I want to do.
I usually don't have a plan for the end; certainly not what any specific commit would be; sure, I could make one (and either make my future self have to do extra work to figure out what commits with lies in their descriptions actually do, or continuously update the commit message marking what actually exists), but as I said that's basically a waste of time. (if you like comparing with past thoughts, sure, but that's definitely not a necessity for a workflow to be reasonable)
"is/isn't an ancestor of the bookmark" is also just a pretty damn good short-hand for denoting a separation between what's been considered the best attempt at the goal, vs things with known problems or just unrelated to the task.
At the core, this if all of course just a question of workflow; if you go into a thing with a plan, meaningful outlook of a non-vague destination, and without expecting continuous switching back&forth between a dozen other things over the time span the branch is alive, caring less about branches or branch names can perhaps work.
> The first line of a commit message is already a summary of the work done.
But you can't (sanely) use it to reference the branch in a revset, can't find it anywhere other than the full log (that's interleaved and mixed with a bunch of other things that you won't ever need to search for), and actual English just gets in the way for finding it, remembering it, and identifying it in a list.
This alone means that, even if I found interest in massively-ahead-of-time-describing commits, having a sane branch reference is still simply just necessary.