Now an AI-generated PR summary I fully support. That's a use of the tool I find to be very helpful. Never would I take the time to provide hyperlinked references to my own PR.
Now an AI-generated PR summary I fully support. That's a use of the tool I find to be very helpful. Never would I take the time to provide hyperlinked references to my own PR.
I don't need an AI generated PR summary because the AI is unlikely to understand why the changes are being made, and specifically why you took the approach(es) that you did.
I can see the code, I know what changed. Give me the logic behind this change. Tell me what issues you ran into during the implementation and how you solved them. Tell me what other approaches you considered and ruled out.
Just saying "This change un-links frobulation from reticulating splines by doing the following" isn't useful. It's like adding code comments that tell you what the next line does; if I want to know that I'll just read the next line.
But I explained to the AI why we're doing the change. When the AI and I try something and we fail I explain that and it's included in the PR.
The AI has far more energy than I do when it comes to writing PR summaries, I have done it so many times, it's not the main part of my job. I have already provided all the information for a PR, why should I repeat myself? What happened to DRY?
But that's not what a PR summary is best used for. I don't need links to exact files, the Diff/Files tab is a click away and it usually has a nice search feature. The Commits tab is a little bit less helpful, but also already exists. I don't need an AI telling me stuff already at my fingertips.
A good PR summary should be the why of the PR. Not redundantly repeat what changed, give me description of why it changed, what alternatives were tested, what you think the struggles were, what you think the consequences may be, what you expect the next steps to be, etc.
I've never seen an AI generated summary that comes close to answering any of those questions. An AI generated summary is a bit like that junior developer that adds plenty of comments but all the comments are:
Yes, I can see it adds x and y, that's already said by the code itself, why are we adding x and y? What's the "result" used for?I'm going to read the code anyway to review a PR, a summary of what the code already says it does is redundant information to me.