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This makes no sense to me. The code is already self-documenting if written well, and all you need is a one line commit message to summarize that.

Doesn't the original conversation at least retain the context about why the change was made? A different LLM literally has no way to tell why you made this change besides guessing from the codebase and git history.

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If a change makes sense, a different frontier model can usually figure out why it was made from the code alone. I take that as a signal that that the commit is good.

I believe they can do this due to having millions of public pull requests and github issues in their training data.

There's pretty much always several plausible reasons for why a change was made. What's interesting is knowing exactly which one, especially when it later turns out to be wrong!

What a change does is self documenting. Why it was made and why that specific approach was chosen could be due to many things, such as:

* business objectives,

* the result of experimentation,

* the result of an offline conversation

etc.

This cannot be captured in code alone. This is why we write commit messages.

the mechanism is self documenting; context is not unless you pollute all your files with an ADR's worth of alternatives.

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