sotto

i should preface by saying i hate ai and very much think we're in a bubble.

but i also don't feel strong enough about it to deject it entirely.

imho i spend far too much minutes of my life writing/thinking of commit messages. if ai can do it decent enough for me, especially on my throwaway projects, i'll gladly accept its help.

i do not like aicommits (or any of the other existing cli tools for ai commits) because it's just too much fucking ceremony. you run commit and it's only then that you send a call to your llm to generate the message and let you pick the one you want. no one wants to fucking sit through that, i might as well have not used it at all.

the screenshots above are a perfect example of how ridiculous this process is. you sit for about 5 seconds on average waiting for the result to come back from running aicommits. in this case, it's the models fault for giving an incorrect message, but it adds to the waste of time that is running aicommits after staging.

this next screenshot is even more egregious. i made the same change, and although this time it was right, the command took 14 seconds to run. for a one line change.

i don't really have interest in hearing "your model is just bad." there is virtually no model that should not be able to generate either a correct or timely commit message for a one line change. These things do not take that long to receive a response.

the issue is not the api call, it's when we are actually offloading this work to the llm. it's also how much of the interface we have decided to change for the user. everyone has their own preferences, but personally, i do not fucking understand why you would want to flex an entirely different/new muscle to do something like writing commits, which should be a mindless task.

anyways, over the weekend i wrote up a prototype employs a different approach: i simply poll for file edits/saves in a repo, and make the api call there. i then add a configurable debounce timer to check when/if to make a call again based on how different your diff is from the previously cached entry.

repo: cachebag/sotto

i am biased, but i genuinely think even this poorly written, prototype is better than everything else that exists because it takes away the annoying fucking friction of staring at a rainbow colored terminal prompt asking you which commit message to choose. i shouldn't need to run a new command to generate a commit message. it should be within the flow of git itself.

i am aware that this is a really silly problem, and likely no one will care or use it; but it really bothered me personally to want something like this to work, only to see the best options not work.

i go a bit more in depth about the technical details in the repo's README. of course, you can also just read the code, it's really not that complicated.

this will probably be my new time waster for the next few weeks.