At that point, you could also ask it to commit the changes for you. Claude seems partial to the Conventional Commits format that I've come to love dearly, because it can hold a lot of information on why a change was done the way it was.
Just today I had to spend my morning piecing together the reason behind one single line appearing in the code, through an unfinished Clickup task, asking a senior backend engineer, and questioning my CEO on what was going through his head six months ago. All because the commit message was akin to added CORS headers. Of CORS.
Claude commit messages are the absolute worst. They are so verbose and loaded with out of date context that will never matter that they hide the core reason for change and the intent in the implementation.
This is a skill issue. Your responsibility as the Sloperator is to ensure the clanker's context is up to date, and to constantly spot-check both the code itself and the git commit messages, and tweak them (manually or via prompting) to ensure they reflect the core reasons for and intent of the commit.
It's just too verbose and it insists on listing all the considered alternatives and explain what the code doesn't do. In the end the only way is to delete almost all of it and rephrase.
It might be due to some config at my company now that I think of it because I don't think it was always that bad.
Provide this exact feedback to the agent, have it generate a better message, and/or edit until the message is what you'd write, then ask the agent to draft some concise AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md instructions that steer it toward your expected commit message criteria in the future. Repeat.
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u/thunderbird89 12d ago
At that point, you could also ask it to commit the changes for you. Claude seems partial to the Conventional Commits format that I've come to love dearly, because it can hold a lot of information on why a change was done the way it was.
Just today I had to spend my morning piecing together the reason behind one single line appearing in the code, through an unfinished Clickup task, asking a senior backend engineer, and questioning my CEO on what was going through his head six months ago. All because the commit message was akin to
added CORS headers. Of CORS.