NEVER Write Git Commit Messages With ChatGPT

Key Takeaways

I know some people out there are desperately trying to take the crypto bro Monica and apply it to AI as some sort of insult but chat GPT and other similar tools are basically here to stay whether we're talking about text generation art Generation video generation music generation or anything else that might happen into the future even though I really think they have serious copyright implications there's no stopping them right now and assuming you're using them for what they're good at they're great tools the problem is they're very easy to misuse and please for the love of God there is one use case for these tools that I really hope doesn't catch on and goes away as quickly as it arose during my search for video topics on forums subreddits things like that I've been seeing the rise of a new kind of application an application that helps you write your git commit messages it does it by using chat GPT one such example of this is this one here chat GPT commit message hook this is by no means the only one out there and I'm not trying to single out this developer I'm sure they do great work and I'm not trying to discredit the work they've done on this project I'm sure they only have have the best intentions but I would heavily caution against using a project like this or any of the others out there outside of personal projects or projects that are basically already a mess if the git commit messages don't mean anything anyway it's just a giant wall of changes made updates done changes added in that case sure it's probably better but in a project that wants a good history do not use these tools but with all that being said it might not seem entirely clear why you shouldn't use it whilst not perfect chat GPT is mostly great at understanding the code that has been written most of the time assuming the code block isn't way too big with way too many esoteric libraries it can give a reason able description of what that code is doing you don't even have to try it with any of these helper tools just go to chat GPT directly dump in a function dump in a file and just see what it does ask it to describe it and it should be able to do a pretty good job and with the exception of maybe modifying The Prompt a bit this tool and many of the others are doing pretty much the same thing on the back end so the demonstration shown by this and many of the others are pretty good at describing what the code is doing but that's the problem that is not the point of a get commit message so this sort of takes us back to the last lioness 12 volt rant video I did we can very easily see what changes were made we can look at the commit we can look at the patch and see okay that change is made that change is made we added this we removed that okay makes sense but it's not the optimal use of that real estate a much better explanation for the commit is why why was this done yes it's useful to explain what is being done so you can actually like easily search through it but why was this commit made okay you added this new function to I don't know add a new user record into the database why what purpose does that have why was the old solution not good enough what reason does your code have for existing besides wanting to write more code or put a bit more coherently what problem is this commit attempting to solve and why does this commit exist and without a doubt if you asked it I'm sure chat GPT could give you some nonsense explanation about why this commit needs to exist but a wrong explanation is kind of worse than none whatsoever it leads you in the completely wrong direction and there is simply not enough data in the changes that are being made to give you a good answer here you'd need at a minimum bare minimum the context of the whole function the whole file may be the whole project and unless that project is really small like you know a 500 line script today chat GPT simply cannot handle that but even then with that context it still probably cannot give you a good reason why this needs to exist it doesn't have the context of the mailing list the issue tracker some discussion on IRC a cve documented outside of the project all of these things in different contexts are going to be really important now that isn't to say that you couldn't fees simply build a custom model or feed the information in the chat GPT in such a way that it can properly parse it and give you an explanation for why this commit needs to exist but when we are talking about doing that it's like spending 10x 100x the time just to write something that would take you know a minute two minute five minutes to do at Absolute Max and the other problem is even if you can structure this data in a way that's actually going to be possible and actually going to be usable by the model which by itself is already going to be a massive challenge especially with how much data we are actually considering there's no guarantee that the result you're going to get is going to make any sense and as I established earlier you don't want to have an incorrect commit message this is worse than having none whatsoever now that's not to say that AI machine learning whatever you want to call it doesn't have a place in writing the you know extra things involved with your code one place it might make sense is with documentation here is a place where you do kind of want to explain you know how what is being done is actually being done the purpose of encode documentation is to take the code that's there and put it into a format that is a bit more human readable sure you can go and read the code but having that explanation there is probably going to be helpful as well the issue here is the same issue with letting it just go and blindly write commit messages what it's going to write may or may not be incorrect so I would highly recommend that if you are going to be using chat GPT or other tools that come out into the future for doing this don't blindly accept the results use it in the way that a lot of artists have started using AI art generate the thing and then touch it up in a way that makes it make a bit more sense I'll say it one last time bad or out-to-date documentation is kinda worse than having none whatsoever it sends you down a path that is going to lead to Impossible results and just waste your time having no path whatsoever at least saves you a couple of minutes of exploring something that is completely impossible right now we are entering a golden age of Ai and machine learning it's still fairly early on tools are drastically changing around us and it seems like a lot of these new tools that are coming out can be incredibly useful and seem like they can basically do anything but that's not really the case they have a limited set of capabilities that they are really good at and for other things at least for now should probably be avoided and commit messages are definitely one of those but I am speaking about this from March 14 2023 and as we've seen from the AI Art Space things are changing really really quickly so maybe by this time next month next year whenever you see this everything has changed and none of what I said is true anymore I hope that's the case I want to do less work less work sounds great but let me know your thoughts in the comments section down below do you care about this tooling that's coming out do you think it's a fad do you think it's just gonna go away what do you think I would love to know so if you like this video I'm gonna go and like the video and if you really liked the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out the patreon Scribe soliburo pay linked down below that's gonna be it for me and this video is made by chat GPT [Music] foreign [Music]