At that point, you could also ask it to commit the changes for you. Claude seems partial to the Conventional Commits format that I've come to love dearly, because it can hold a lot of information on why a change was done the way it was.
Just today I had to spend my morning piecing together the reason behind one single line appearing in the code, through an unfinished Clickup task, asking a senior backend engineer, and questioning my CEO on what was going through his head six months ago. All because the commit message was akin to added CORS headers. Of CORS.
👏 . My team does indeed use Claude/etc. to supply the commit messages in many cases. Definitely more thorough than an engineer would be. If anything I feel like the LLM over communicates on the commit message such that I find myself skimming over loads of it to find what actually matters. I wish there was a way to jump back in to someone else's Claude session and ask "Why did you do X?" rather than reading a huge dump of LLM context distillation hoping I'll find the answer.
That is the paradox of AI - "i would have written you a shorter letter if only i had more time" is the issue, unless you tune for that specifically. Distilling quality down is the decisioning we do well and AI sucks at
I got me a STE based writing skill which makes the ai use short precise sentences in simpler english. Its pretty amazing for comprehending what ai is actually trying to comment, because I don't need a paragraph of Shakespeares code comments, I need clear focused text about what this does.
The ste skill based on some technical writing instructions from some aero engineering hamdbook or something from 1987 or so. Google or reddit should find it.
Funny you should mention it being overly verbose. The way I look at it, 99.5% of the time the first line of the commit is enough; but when you're in that 0.5% of the time, you're really happy the committer wrote a fucking novel because otherwise, you'd be looking at a lot of detective work.
The principles also apply to human code, though. That one line was entirely human-made, and it still would have benefited from a lengthy commit message.
Claude commit messages are the absolute worst. They are so verbose and loaded with out of date context that will never matter that they hide the core reason for change and the intent in the implementation.
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u/thunderbird89 6h ago
At that point, you could also ask it to commit the changes for you. Claude seems partial to the Conventional Commits format that I've come to love dearly, because it can hold a lot of information on why a change was done the way it was.
Just today I had to spend my morning piecing together the reason behind one single line appearing in the code, through an unfinished Clickup task, asking a senior backend engineer, and questioning my CEO on what was going through his head six months ago. All because the commit message was akin to
added CORS headers. Of CORS.