[jupp0r]

Slightly offtopic, but because this was prominently featured in their demo:

AI generated commit messages are horrible. I'm not opposed to them in principle, but currently every implementation I have seen uses the code change itself as the context to generate the message. This is just wrong. Commit messages are there to convey information that's explicitly not contained in the code itself and shouldn't just repeat or summarize the code changes (that's what the diff is for). They should contain the reason why the code change was made in the first place, approaches that were considered and did not make it into the code change, etc. Short everything that's not contained in the diff.

AI commit message generators incentivize people to write the wrong type of commit message.

[schacon]

Well, two things. They're not on by default, you have to enable them. Both because it means we have to send your code diffs outside your machine, but mostly because lots of people don't want them.

The other is that the point is not to take away writing good commit messages. The opposite. One item on our task list is to create the _best_ commit message editor we can think of. One that Linux kernel hackers would want to use to craft a great commit. But that's for a bit later.

The AI thing, in our minds, is to eliminate "fixed some stuff" messages that have zero semantic value. If you're committing just to push, you might as well have AI give you some searchable text in less time than it would take you to write a crappy commit message.

[jupp0r]

I totally see where you are coming from, I've just seen the fallout from more and more tools adding similar features and the net benefit has not been there, quite the opposite. It makes it easy to do the wrong thing.

That being said, with enough context (slack threads about the feature, zoom meeting transcripts, design docs, etc) I could totally see AI commit message generation being great in the future, but that's obviously a harder problem to solve than just piping the diff to OpenAI or similar.