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Cover image for OpenCommit: GitHub Action to improve commits with meaningful messages on every `git push` šŸ¤ÆšŸ”«

OpenCommit: GitHub Action to improve commits with meaningful messages on every `git push` šŸ¤ÆšŸ”«

Dima Sukharev on May 21, 2023

Hi Hackers, About 10 days ago, I came across the #GitHubHack23 post and then I thought: "Hmm... ain't I got something to contribute?" ā€” squinting ...
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Nikolay Nelidov

cool idea! I've been trying to get my team to write better commits, but it didn't really work šŸ™‚

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Cy "kkm" K'Nelson

Obligatory xkcd.com/1296/

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Dima Sukharev

lol true, you start with good and finish with ui

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Dima Sukharev

hihi, thanks, that happens, lol :) if you try and like (or don't) OpenCommit as an Action for the whole team repo ā€” please leave me a feedback in the issues

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Kent Ezra A. Betita

Nice work, Dima! I can see myself using this in the future. Would it be possible to also generate a PR description as well? Like when someone creates a pull request an action will be triggered that will generate a description based on the changes.

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Vencel Bajnok

+1 That would be great for PRs also.

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Dima Sukharev

gonna do the PRs, also thought about it :) fully automated git pipelines

next opencommit is doing is writing code for you and committing it after AI-TDD tests pass

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Rudolf Olah

This is very cool, this part in particular where you're generating the commit message based on the diff and how the prompt for that is constructed with one example, it would be interesting to see the output if the prompt's example is based on the programming languages used in the diff.

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Dima Sukharev

thank you bro! i also like the code, try it out as a Github Action :)

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Anna D • Edited

Hey, this is a pretty clever use of GPT. I can see how this could really help in maintaining a clean and coherent commit history. As someone who sometimes gets a bit lazy with commit messages, I might give it a shot. Thanks for your work on this!

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Dima Sukharev

that's great, I was so bored with lame messages like fixed and `done ā€” so i created this tool i use everyday

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Cy "kkm" K'Nelson • Edited

I guess, with more and more powerful LLMs coming ā€” we are the last generation of engineers who are manually typing the commit messages (and maybe typing at all lol)

And thus deprive future LLMs of training data. Or, rather, force future LLMs data pipelines to learn throwing away previous LLM-generated data from the training set, letting through only the human-generated commit messages. N-n-nice! This is how the new technology's tail strikes you hard at the forehead when you think you're running up front. Cool! That's something to philosophise about!

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Dima Sukharev

hahah :)

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Dmitry i

so, we do not need to create commit messages manually anymore at all.. šŸ„‚ great idea

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Dima Sukharev

That was my idea of like getting rid of manually coming up with a clever commit message yourself, i guess future developers will remember our generation as the last one who created commit messages manually :)

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Joran Quinten

Any tedious, lenient process that can be automated, should be automated. Love this idea!

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Dan Jones

So, you commit with whatever message you want, and the Action rewrites your commits? Am I understanding that right?

If so, you then have to reset your local repo every time so you have the new commit messages and don't get merge conflicts.

That sounds incredibly complicated. Why not build it as a prepare-commit-message hook so it's done locally?

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Dima Sukharev

it doesn't create any conflicts, you can check the demo :)

and well it's open source, so i would be extremely happy if you contribute your ideas, cause prepare-commit-message is a smart thing to implement as an option

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Dan Jones

But you had to do a git pull --rebase which, it would seem, wiped out the original commit, probably because it's now empty. If you'd done just git pull, without the rebase, you'd have a conflict.

All this rewriting of history after it's been pushed to a public remote repo seems pretty messy.

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Dima Sukharev • Edited

no bro, if you do pull --no-rebase it's same, no conflicts are there because opencommit doesn't change any code, only message. SHA becomes different, but git doesnt create any conflicts you would need to solve, because code is same.. all good :)

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Carl Walsh

Do your docs have any before and after graphic of how the Action changes the branch commits?

My first reaction was the same, that this would create a problem with my local branch being 1 commit ahead and behind the remote, but I don't think I understand what the Action is actually doing.

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Evgeny

I hope I will try it someday) cool work!

Btw, Can you make this action as a GitHub hook for Husky for example? Or as a standalone app maybe. Is it possible to run it locally? Because we don't use GitHub and someone maybe doesn't use GitLab, etc. So it will be great to have some local solution

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Dima Sukharev

sure, you can set it up as a cli npm i -g opencommit and then just run oco in any repo :)

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Daniel Hoek

Ive Been doing this for a few weeks now but with gitlab merges instead. Doings a diff of the source and destination branch and getting GPT to list changes in each file, why it's done and a summary overall. Also asked for emoji's to make it more fun. Using GPT4, it's spitting out really great summaries that definitely improve the review process. Nice idea with opencommit!

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Dima Sukharev

thank you man :)

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Mihir Rabade

I'm waiting for git staging version of OpenCommit nowšŸ˜‚

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Mihir Rabade

Wait my bad, I didn't look deeply into this, but there's CLI version šŸ¤”

Time to use that!

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Michelle Duke

Always happy to clarify things šŸ˜‰

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ed

Do I need a paid chagpt account?

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Dima Sukharev

you use you own openAI api, they give you $15 free credits which is ~2 months opencommit usage. then you bind a card and pay for your own requests

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Enigma Gaming

Kudos!