News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on We should revisit literate programming in the agent era. Parent comment

Re:We should revisit literate programming in the agent era by 1718627440 on Monday March 09, 2026 @02:25AM (#47305452)
If you throw away commit messages, that is on you, it is not a limitation of Git. If I am cleaning up before merging, I'm maybe rephrasing things, but I am not throwing that information away. I regularly push branches under 'draft/...' or 'fail/...' to the central project repository.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We should revisit literate programming in the agent era by kalaksi on Monday March 09, 2026 @03:31AM (#47305850)
Sounds easier (for everybody) to just use comments.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We should revisit literate programming in the agent era by 1718627440 on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @07:11AM (#47321661)
You put past failed implementation in comments? That sounds like a nightmare. I rather only include a short description in the comment that can then link to the older implementation if necessary.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We should revisit literate programming in the agent era by kalaksi on Sunday March 15, 2026 @05:12AM (#47385598)
What? No, a short explanation of why some approach doesn't work well.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We should revisit literate programming in the agent era by eru on Monday March 09, 2026 @07:31AM (#47307669)
Sure, but you are still supposed to clean things up to make the life of the reviewer easier.

There's an inherent tension between honest history and a polished 'lie' to make the reviewer's life easier.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We should revisit literate programming in the agent era by seba_dos1 on Monday March 09, 2026 @09:52AM (#47309071)
The "honest" historical record of when I decided to use "git commit" while working on something is 100% useless for anyone but me (for me it's 90% useless).

git tracks revisions, not history of file changes.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We should revisit literate programming in the agent era by 1718627440 on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @07:09AM (#47321655)
The WIP commits I initially recorded also don't necessarily existed as such in my file system and often don't really work completely, so I don't know why the commit after a rebase is any more a lie then the commit before the rebase.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We should revisit literate programming in the agent era by eru on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @09:42PM (#47330925)
It's a 'lie' in the sense that you are optimising for telling a convenient and easy to understand story for the reviewer where each commit works atomically.
[ Parent | on HN ]