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Yes, obviously the computer can’t find answers that have been lost to the mists of time; pointing to a specific discussion is a best-case scenario, and relies o
by wolfgang42 3y ago
Yes, obviously the computer can’t find answers that have been lost to the mists of time; pointing to a specific discussion is a best-case scenario, and relies on a good commit history.
But even just providing a brief explanation of the current code would be a great help (even if it gets confused and gives bad answers occasionally; so do I sometimes!); and even when the history is vague you can usually pull useful information like “this was last changed eight years ago, here’s a ticket number” or “it’s worked like this since the feature was added, I have no idea what they were thinking at the time” or “the change that caused this to start happening claims to be a refactor, but seems to have accidentally inverted a condition in the process”.
And in a magical world where the AI is handling this entire conversation automatically, it would naturally write a good commit message for itself, quoting the discussion with the relevant user, so it has something to point to when the topic comes up again. (And it’d be in all the Slack channels, so when someone mentions in #sales-na-east that Acme has asked about quarking services, it can drop into the conversation and point out that the Wibble Manager might need changing before that turns into an urgent change request because we’ve accidentally sent them a batch of unquarked wibbles. Well, one can dream, anyway.)