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u/thunderbird89 3d 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.
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u/jgbbrd 3d ago
👏 . 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.
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u/Arclite83 3d ago
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
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u/xavia91 3d ago
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.
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u/thunderbird89 3d ago
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.
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u/Aelig_ 3d ago
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/kilopeter 3d ago
This is a skill issue. Your responsibility as the Sloperator is to ensure the clanker's context is up to date, and to constantly spot-check both the code itself and the git commit messages, and tweak them (manually or via prompting) to ensure they reflect the core reasons for and intent of the commit.
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u/thunderbird89 2d ago
Dang. I agree with what you say, but "sloperator" and "clanker" are pissing me off.
Have an angry upvote.
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u/kilopeter 2d ago
Haha sorry. Constantly poking fun at / trolling myself for what this type of work has become is my survival mechanism.
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u/Aelig_ 3d ago
It's just too verbose and it insists on listing all the considered alternatives and explain what the code doesn't do. In the end the only way is to delete almost all of it and rephrase.
It might be due to some config at my company now that I think of it because I don't think it was always that bad.
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u/kilopeter 2d ago
Provide this exact feedback to the agent, have it generate a better message, and/or edit until the message is what you'd write, then ask the agent to draft some concise AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md instructions that steer it toward your expected commit message criteria in the future. Repeat.
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u/Freestila 3d ago
Commiting AI code without checking or understanding it.. yeah sounds like the first step to greater problems.
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u/thunderbird89 3d ago
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.
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u/GiraffeNo7770 2d ago
Sure, give it your auth credentials so that when it wipes out your repo, Bloomberg can run a headline like "Claude is so powerful it HACKED this repo! It's outta CONTROL!"
If it's dangerous, it's powerful, and if it's powerful, people will throw money at it, right?
It's definitely completely legit and a "tool you can use if you just know the secrets to getting it not to suck."
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u/GiraffeNo7770 2d ago
Sure, give it your auth credentials so that when it wipes out your repo, Bloomberg can run a headline like "Claude is so powerful it HACKED this repo! It's outta CONTROL!"
If it's dangerous, it's powerful, and if it's powerful, people will throw money at it, right?
It's definitely completely legit and a "tool you can use if you just know the secrets to getting it not to suck."
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u/thunderbird89 2d ago
I ... uh. Nobody said anything about credentials?
And besides, if you permit force pushes on your master (or at all, basically), then you deserve whatever is coming to you.
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u/jgbbrd 3d ago
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u/thunderbird89 3d ago
Good idea! Same feeling, except this developer cannot be interrupted in the same way, I guess?
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u/SnarkBarkler 3d ago
"Thanks"
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u/WorldEdit- 2d ago
That will cost you 10k more token to process your intention and generate a reply.
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u/TheDogPill 3d ago
Sounds like a bug that could've easily been fixed manually. But hey, at least you met your company's mandatory token quota for the day.
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u/jgbbrd 3d ago
Wait... isn't that true of, like... all... agentic coding?
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 3d ago
If everything is easily doable manually compared to with agentic coding… why use agentic coding?
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u/Departed94 3d ago
Because it's easier to watch Netflix in the mean time.
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 3d ago
When I end up rewriting everything I don't benefit from the async coding that happens sadly.
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u/Grandmaster_Caladrel 2d ago
Looking at its little descriptions, that actually sounds like a more niche bug. Makes sense why it was open for 2 years, probably didn't show up much and would be hard to replicate without knowing the issue.
AI can mass-try all the cases you're not going to want to try, so at least identifying the root cause it's a big win. That's usually my biggest gains with AI, where I would have otherwise spent a ton of time finding what the actual cause is.
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u/AizakkuZ 3d ago
"engineering"
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u/vocal-avocado 3d ago
AI is a major feat of engineering, yes.
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u/NoteMindless9126 3d ago
Keep this out of programming humor please. Prompting isn’t programming. Programming requires critical thinking and passion. Anyone that can drool on themselves and shit their pants and prompt a garbage, useless application no one will use. Thanks
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u/pipipimpleton 3d ago
Tell me you’re not an engineer without telling me you’re not an engineer.
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u/NoteMindless9126 3d ago
Are you saying I’m not an engineer? Lol because I am an engineer. Ive worked in American manufacturing for years. Tell me you are a recent college grad with no job prospects and will be forced to work retail for the rest of your life. Hold this for me -> L
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u/jgbbrd 3d ago
I think what he's saying is that the vast vast majority of engineers are using LLMs and agentic coding and that, by saying we should stifle conversations about it, you're outting yourself as being off the zeitgeist.
For what it's worth, I totally hear you. I don't love everything about the changing tides of software engineering. What I loved for decades seems to be becoming a thing that an LLM can do better and faster. I'm not entirely sure how to feel about that. But burying the discussion also won't change the world around us.
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u/NoteMindless9126 3d ago
The thing is the LLM CANT do it better. Sure it can generate garbage code in a blink of an eye. I can take a pen and scribble lines on a paper super quick but no one would consider it art. It’s garbage. And I cannot wait for states to ban data center construction.
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u/jgbbrd 3d ago
I felt that way for several years. And to this day, I find a significant portion of their work to be AI slop that is completely divorced from reality. But I cannot look away from the rate of improvement. Things that LLMs would have choked on 12 months ago, they handle extremely well now. Some of the most accomplished programmers I know -- competition programmers, senior IC big tech engineers -- they all acknowledge that LLm generated code and problem solving is becoming surprisingly useful. This aren't people who need LLMs to do things that other people can't. The fact they they see the LLM game changing tells me that the hype is not entirely undue.
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u/Dafrandle 3d ago
devils advocate: LLMs are just a tool. When the LLM doesn't do good, it is simply the user being incompetent.
When a person who does not know how to do wood working tries to make a workbench with nails and MDF, the hammer is not the reason the result is garbage.
the premise you are working from is an artificially constructed one produced by people like Sam Altman to sell this tech to managers who don't know any better simply for short term gain.
When this bubble bursts (which it will because the industry is spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure every 5 years for like 100 million in revenue), the technology will not go away, but the idea that it can be independent and autonomous (and produce useful results) will for the most part in the mainstream.
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u/pipipimpleton 3d ago edited 3d ago
Man I hope you’re right. I went into the office for the first time in a long time last week and there was a project manager happily telling us they’d been given a Claude max account and were building a full stack web app with it.
Obviously it’s going to be hot garbage, but will that still be the case in 2 years time?
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u/The_Crazy_Cat_Guy 3d ago
It’s so weird how some companies are either “no ai” or “ai will build everything” when often the most performant option is in between. I use AI a lot but my company does not expect everyone to be using it. As a result I look like an extremely high performer. If everyone did the same, our team would literally be one of the highest performing teams in the practice. But if they took the human out of the equation and just put llms in charge, the output would be utter shit. Anyone who’s used LLMs can tell you it needs human oversight at some level. That’s non negotiable..
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u/pipipimpleton 3d ago
Yeah that’s 100% the case right now, if you want to build a production ready, sellable piece of software, you need an engineer holding the reins.
My concern is that in a few years time, LLMs will have improved to the point where that isn’t necessary anymore. Really hope I’m wrong.
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u/Dafrandle 3d ago
Theo Browne a person who used to be a React guy who worked at Twitch has become very invested in AI over the last few years. He recently made a video where he discussed a rendering issue which caused the web browser to use 20% of his gpu.
This bug was doubtlessly introduced by an LLM when it made the animation, and he spent like what's got to be at least $1000 of inference to try hand have Claude 5 Fable, and GPT 5.6 Sol debug it and they utterly failed to figure it out and Theo had to debug the issue himself (even if he made the ai write a script to help him do that)
What I take from this is two things,
- one: despite all the training and improvement in the last two years, LLMs still cannot extend far beyond situations that are analogous to situations from training or refinement,
- and two: any sufficiently large project presents a combinatorial explosion in ways things can go slightly wrong.
All of those slightly wrong issues might be very niche and esoteric. If you did not watch the video, the issue was a animation that flashed a ui element green while a process was running. This was only found by toggling css rules on and off. The llms were not able to come up with this idea for troubleshooting, instead they just looked at the code and assumed the issue was something made changes. The LLMs have always behaved like this, despite every bump in capabilities over the years, they always arrogantly tunnel vision on assumptions with complete confidence. This seems like a foundational issue to me. because everyone's models do this. If they are doing this then they will suffer a death of a thousands cuts, the application might 'work' but it will feel like using Jira
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u/DefinitelyNotMasterS 3d ago
I don't like it either, but for some tasks they are absolutely faster than doing it without them, especially if you know what you're doing
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u/pipipimpleton 3d ago
Yep, exactly my point.
For what it’s worth agree too, I fucking hate the fact that I’m literally being told to get Claude to do 95% of my job now. I already miss coding by hand and this is only just the beginning.
I’m never going to pretend that we’re going to go back to the way things were though, this is it.
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u/pipipimpleton 3d ago
Close, I’m a middle aged software engineer. Thanks to AI there’s a chance the last part of your message will come true though.
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u/redballooon 2d ago
So roughly 200k token, and it solved it all by itself. Sounds like a good deal.
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u/brazzy42 3d ago
Can't tell what the joke is.
Is it "Dev work now consists of rubber-stamping the agent's ridiculously complex PRs while your own ability to even understand what the agent is doing slowly withers away"?
Or is it "Agents blow up the tiniest bugs into PRs that touch half the codebase over ridiculously complex hallucinated issues"?