Quoting Kenton Varda
Simon Willison Simon Willison
Kenton Varda banned his team from using AI to write change descriptions for pull requests and commits. The AI-generated descriptions included low-level code details visible in diffs while omitting the high-level context needed to understand the changes' purpose. As a result, Varda found the descriptions made code review harder rather than easier.
Why it matters
I just declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions (e.g. PR and commit messages, also issues/tickets) from my team. AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be seen by looking at the code, but omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing. — Kenton Varda Tags: kenton-varda, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms
