Source details
- Original source
- Simon Willison
- Published
- 2026-07-08
- Primary topic
- AI Agents
Why it matters
Agent products, browser agents, autonomous workflows, operator systems, and orchestration tools. This item originated as a short-form social post, so the context blocks below help expand it into tools, models, and evaluation guides.
What happened
I've been letting Claude and GLT-5.5 write almost all of my commit messages recently, but I don't feel great about it "omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing" is definitely the key problem there Kenton Varda (@KentonVarda) I just declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions (e.g. PR and commit messages, also issues/tickets) from my team. AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be seen by looking at the code, but omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing. I think people like having AI write these things because the output looks structured and thorough, which makes it feel professional in a way. But this isn't actually valuable. Concise, high-level descriptions are better for everyone. If I need to use my own AI to interpret what your AI wrote then something is wrong. Let AI write code, sure, but for the description, I'd rather see your prompt than your output. We could maybe have extended agents.md with guidelines on writing descriptions, but this seemed a bit pointless since a good, concise change description only takes a few minutes to write -- not a significant time savings to delegate to AI. At least, it doesn't take long if you understand the code -- and if you don't understand the code, then I'm definitely not merging it. — https://nitter.net/KentonVarda/status/2074924213983740233#m
What to do next
Move into automation and workflow tools next so you can evaluate whether the agent story is actionable or still mostly experimental.
I've been letting Claude and GLT-5.5 write almost all of my commit messages recently, but I don't feel great about it "omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing" is definitely the key problem there Kenton Varda (@KentonVarda) I just declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions (e.g. PR and commit messages, also issues/tickets) from my team. AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be seen by looking at the code, but omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing. I think people like having AI write these things because the output looks structured and thorough, which makes it feel professional in a way. But this isn't actually valuable. Concise, high-level descriptions are better for everyone. If I need to use my own AI to interpret what your AI wrote then something is wrong. Let AI write code, sure, but for the description, I'd rather see your prompt than your output. We could maybe have extended agents.md with guidelines on writing descriptions, but this seemed a bit pointless since a good, concise change description only takes a few minutes to write -- not a significant time savings to delegate to AI. At least, it doesn't take long if you understand the code -- and if you don't understand the code, then I'm definitely not merging it. — https://nitter.net/KentonVarda/status/2074924213983740233#m
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