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Discussion on: What if your apps get rebuilt, only from reading the commit messages?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

This is funny to think about.

Realistically, commit messages probably are a really useful labelling tool of some kind for AI, whether or not this task is accomplishable. Whether good or bad, they say something about an app.

I wonder what the correlation between commit message quality and project success is. They are probably correlated, but I could imagine scenarios where maybe some form of sloppiness might have personality trait crossover which helps get a project to market faster? Just spitballing.

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jankapunkt profile image
Jan Küster

Also question is, where concise commit messages are really important (and not just a formality): CI/CD? Onboarding? Revision/Audits? Refactoring?

The idea behind the thought experiment is to me that, if we have enough context and a hypothetical ai that can perfectly transform such context it should be able to recreate the code from the commit messages (a little bit like with event sourcing).

However the gap between this and reality is that we don't even know when commit messages are relevant and what/how much context is relevant.

Maybe this leads to a few creative ideas in the process.