100%. My team started using graphite.dev, which provides AI generated PR descriptions that are so bloated with useless content that I've learned to just ignore them. The issue is they are doing a kind of reverse inference from the code changes to a human-readable description, which doesn't actually capture the intent behind the changes.

I tell my team that the diff already perfectly describes what changed. The commits and PR are to convey WHY and in what context and what we learned (or should look out for). Putting the "what" in the thing meant for the "why" is using the tools incorrectly.

Yes, that’s the hard thing about having a “what changed” section in the PR template. I agree with you, but generally put a very condensed summary of what changed to fulfill the PR template expectations. Not the worst compromise

My template:

1. What is this change supposed to do?

2. Why is this change needed?

3. How was it tested?

4. Is there anything else reviewers should know?

5. Link to issue:

There's no "What changed?" because that's the diff. Explain your intent, why you think it's a good idea, how you know you accomplished your intent, and any future work needed or other concerns noticed while making the change. PR descriptions suffer from the same problem as code comments by beginners: they often just describe the "what" when that's obvious from the code, when the "why" is what's needed. So try very hard to avoid doing that.

It's same same issue we had 20 years ago with javadoc. Write what you want to do, not how you do it.

i++; // increment i (by 1)

My PR templates are: - what CONCEPTUALLY changed here and why - a checklist that asserts the author did in fact run their code and the tests and the migrations and other babysitting rules written in blood - explicit lists of database migrations or other changes - explicit lists of cross dependencies - images or video of the change actually working as intended (also patronizing but also because of too many painful failures without it)

Generally small startups after initial pmf. I have no idea how to run a big company and pre pmf Im guilty of "all cowboy, all the time" - YMMV

Does the PR description not end up in the commit history after merge? A description of what changed is very useful when browsing through git logs.

> A description of what changed is very useful when browsing through git logs.

Doing a blame on a file, or just looking at the diff of the pull request gives you that. The why is lost very fast. After a few months it is possible that the people that did the change is not anymore in the company, so nobody to ask why something was done.

"Oh, they changed the algorithm to generate random numbers". I can see that in the code. "Why was it changed?". I have not clue if there is no extra information somewhere else like a change log, pull request description, or in the commit comments.

But all this depends on the company and size of the project. In your situation may be different.

Not just browsing, but also searching.

The PR spec for some open source projects are quite onerous.

What is unspoken here is that some open projects are using cost of submission AND cost of change / contrib as a kind of means of keeping review work down.

Nobody is correct here really. It's just that the bottlenecks have changed and we need to rethink everything.

Changing something small on a very large project is a good test. A user might simply want a new optional argument or something. Now they can do it and PR. But the process is geared towards people who know the project better even if the contributor can run all the tests it is still not trivial to fill in the PR request for a trivial change.

We need to rethink this regime shift a bit.

you mean we will get even more of these sort of useless comments?

  // loop over list and act on items
  for each _, item := range items {
    item.act()
  }

As a Mac user, Notepad++ is the only thing I miss from the Windows ecosystem.

What do you happen to use? I find Sublime Text to be the closest alternative.

At the time (and it was a few years ago), I found BBEdit to be rather amazing - or at least equally a product raised with care in its ecosystem over decades of use.

There is this https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext

It runs on Wine.

It runs with difficulty on Wine. Example: I have localization for Japanese fonts on my Linux system but it wasn't showing up in Notepad++. I love Notepad++, but that was the final straw. I have switched to Geany which is missing many features from Notepad++, but will display the fonts correctly. I'm sure there's a way to get the fonts loaded up through Wine, but I've given up.

Geany is great, but you can take a look at Kate as well if it doesn't meet all your needs.

Thank you, I will check it out.

It runs great on Wine, I use it all the time for quick notes and todo lists.

It runs but has always felt lumpy to me.

I just cancelled my Kagi subscription over the weekend. Some of the ideas in the article resonate (the dev team seems spread way too thin) but I also decided that the main product just wasn't distinct enough. The lens and quick answers features were nice, but otherwise the search results were not that different from Google's -- Having just switched back, I haven't noticed a significant difference.

I also think this product might be a bit too late. GPT4 has been out for over a year now, and it's changed how I look for answers. I tried FastGPT but like the author I found it lacking. As it stands, Perplexity feels more like the future of search than Kagi.

It's likely dependent on the 'user archetype'. If you need to e.g. lookup things related to beginner-friendly programming languages, the search results for Google are strongly tainted with SEO crap.

Being able to either outright block/pin sites, or only lower/raise them in your search results, made a difference for me after a few days of searching.

I do hope the future of search will include being able to use natural language, but also still the more precise '"This" +"That"'.

In any case, more competition is a good thing, the lack of it is what got us into this mess in the first place.

I churned from Kagi twice before sticking around as a long term customer, because the results were better than Google.

I’ll be curious if you come back to Kagi in a couple months too.

I’m disappointed, but I can’t say I’m surprised. I once tried to contact their support team after getting effectively locked out of my account, only to have the support form return a 5XX error upon submission. I dropped them right then and there.

There kind of is, it’s call HR-XML and a number of COTS resume parsers output their results in this format.

> During a spacewalk, Mission Control in Houston warns Explorer's crew about a rapidly-expanding cloud of space debris accidentally caused by the Russians having shot down a presumed defunct spy satellite

Life imitating art.

Except it wasn’t accidental :/

It would be a mass customer extinction event for said service, and would effectively result in a windfall for competing services

Services like Slack are replaceable to most extent. How does even replace a service like Google easily? There are like to like services available for Google but the data is where it becomes tricky. Almost 1bn people losing their email addresses could cause massive issues.

Simply cut a small rectangle out of the sticky part of a Post-It note for a safe camera cover that easy to remove and reuse.

Decent git aliases: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Git-Aliases

This is starting to look like a customer extinction level incident — Any idea which competing service their users / wsb will likely move to?

If they really went all in on risky options contracts... Burger King.

depends on what kind of option contracts they were buying. I loaded up on a bunch of calls last week and am currently sitting here happy as an elephant.

I jumped to Etrade a while back and it's been a relatively positive experience. Power Etrade is garbage though - consistently crashes during spike traffic times

Think or swim most likely

webull and thinkorswim will probably be the two biggest beneficiaries today.

One of the biggest lessons here is not to use tech-forward brokers. I see a lot of people talking about how swapping from robinhood to webull is ridiculous, and I honestly agree. I'm personally thinking of going TD or thinkorswim.

Note that thinkorswim is owned by TD, so it's effectively the same platform.

Yep, fuddy-duddy tech = safe tech.

Going to Webull seems super silly if the issue is mobile/web 2.0+ startup brokers.

I see think or swim and TD/Fidelity being biggest beneficiaries webull seems like more of the same.