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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21203 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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This pr description sucks, but you're just going to say that anything I say is just complaining and nitpicking.

So it seems we're at an impasse here.

Can you take that PR and write a better description that you think would be more helpful than the AI one?

It seems like that would be the major step forward: instead of saying "it sucks", break down the problems with it and provide a superior human-generated one for the same content that we can compare it with.

Good question, here is something along the lines of what human might write. Keep in mind it may be incorrect because I don't actually know what this pr accomplishes.

We discovered a race condition in follow up actions which can cause them to fail if multiple follow ups are requested at the same time. An example of this failure can be seen on #2555. This is because the PR lock is removed before the worktree is cleaned up, allowing the second task to begin execution before the follow up is completed. Here is a timeline of the events on 2555 that shows the issue:

[timeline]

  • This change updates the order of operations to clean up the worktree before releasing the lock.
  • This change also adds a safety net fix for situations ???? <- the ai slop makes zero sense, no idea what this does.

I appreciate the followup.

It seems like the concern is that the AI PR is over-technical and doesn't explain in simple language what happened: I don't see a lot of functional difference between the two. I can see the case that going back in and looking at the AI one will be harder to pick back up on "what exactly did this do", but I think I could figure it out from what they have: the AI writes overly technically, but I could easily see a human doing the same thing.

This change also adds a safety net fix for situations ???? <- the ai slop makes zero sense, no idea what this does.

It looks like there was a situation where if the directory for a worktree was gone, 'git worktree remove' isn't actually going to remove the worktree registration (presumably because it's intended to remove the directory and the registration at the same time, and possibly the original race condition detailed in the PR created a situation where that didn't happen properly for some worktrees), so it introduced a secondary method that checks "is this worktree safe to remove" then removes that worktree registration with a different command, to clean up that situation. There's another mechanism that could remove all stale worktree registrations, but the AI goes out of its way not to run that because it would create another race condition risk.

I checked the code to confirm that, but I do think that PR note actually does make sense, and someone more familiar with the codebase and effects than me (I honestly don't know what a git worktree is) would understand it more easily than me.

the AI PR is over-technical and doesn't explain in simple language what happened

Yes a major issue with slop is that it buries the information in ... well ... slop instead of explaining it clearly. A human may write badly in a human way but would never do something like this.

There are other substantiative issues here, mainly that 2555 is simply an example of a failure in this class, and likely there are other occurrences. It also doesn't mention what situation may trigger this issue.

You can just have a more detailed PR writing skill defined that tells it to start off each note with a concise description of reason for the enhancement. It's really quite easy to set this stuff up.

No you can't. If it's so easy than surely there must be a single working example of this on the internet that actually works.

Most of the time giving it a wall of text instructions doesn't significantly increase the quality of the output, but instead makes it autistically follow the instructions without actually completing the task.

I can't link you to my internal Git PRs but they are basically fine. The idea that you can't prompt engineer text into a reasonable shape is just kind of fanciful. Out of the box you get more verbosity than is useful but you really can just describe how you want the text to be structured and what you want included and it'll definitely do that. Few do this because the number of people who give a shit about PR notes in the nation can fit on a single boeing 747 but you can do it if you want to.

I kind of buy the idea that pr notes can just be omitted, like that other guy in the thread also suggested to leave them blank.

I still believe that the slop adds more noise than signal even with prompting otherwise.

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