This is what has been frustrating me most lately. Even though I have a rule in my global CLAUDE.md that says:
> Only write comments to explain the why when it is not obvious from the code (rationale, gotchas, constraints). Do not comment on the what — well-named code already says it. Do not comment on how a framework works.
It still keeps adding these bad comments. When I then ask it to review the comments based on my preferences it then deletes most of them or improves them.
Today I asked Claude why it disrespects my preference and it said that the surrounding code was like that and it followed that style. It suggested I add this line to my global CLAUDE.md file:
> The comment rule above beats the style of the surrounding code: neighboring files with what-style comments are not license to write more of them, and comments carried along when porting or copying code must be re-judged against the rule, not kept for consistency.
These pages do look good. But they all just look the same. And I'm getting bored of them.
I open such a page and I immediately know it was Claude that produced it (probably end-to-end). Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it lacks soul… and that makes me kind of sad.
I've been doing stacked PRs for ~2 years now. Thus, I don't quite see the need for this CLI. Git has had some additions in the last few years that make this work natively – specifically the --update-refs flag[1] or the rebase.updateRefs config. Combined with `git commit --fixup`, rebase.autoStash, and rebase.autoSquash rebasing stacks becomes a breeze (as long as you work off from the tip of your stack). Add in git-absorb[2] and the heavy-lifting is taken care of.
My biggest gripe with GitHub when working with stacks – and something that's not clarified in these docs – is whether fast-forward merges are possible. Its "Merge with rebase" button always rewrites the commit. They do mention that the stack needs to be rebased in order to merge it. My workaround has been `git merge --ff-only top-branch-of-stack` to merge the entire stack locally into main (or anything in between actually) and then push. GitHub neatly recognizes that each PR in the stack is now in main and marks them all as merged. If there are subsequent PRs that weren't merged it updates the base branch.
Having said that, it's great to see GitHub getting a proper UI for this. It's also great that it understands the intent that branch B that goes on top of branch A is a stack and thus CI runs against. I just hope that it's not mandatory to use their CLI in order to create stacks. They do cover this briefly in the FAQ[3], but it might be necessary to use `gh stack init --adopt branch-a branch-b branch-c`. On the other hand, if that removes the need to manually create the N PRs for my stack, that's nice.
I have a global setting for that. Whenever I work in a repo that deviates from that I override it locally. I have a few other aliases that rely on the default branch, such as “switch to the default branch”. So I usually notice it quite quickly when the value is off in a particular repo.
I'm of the opinion that Git hooks are personal. That's why they're not part of the source code itself. I make extensive use of hooks, but they're tailored to my needs.
Note that you can skip hooks by passing the --no-verify flag to subcommands. Comes in handy when they're slow and you know that you've just fixed the wrong formatting that the previous invocation of your pre-commit hook complained about.
> Using commit log diffs as changelogs is a bad idea: they're full of noise. Things like merge commits, commits with obscure titles, documentation changes, etc.
> The purpose of a commit is to document a step in the evolution of the source code. Some projects clean up commits, some don't.
> The purpose of a changelog entry is to document the noteworthy difference, often across multiple commits, to communicate them clearly to end users.
> Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month".
Best example for me: Revolut. The app and product as a whole was so simple and good.
One year ago (or maybe 1.5 years ago) it started going downhill, fast. The app got so complicated that I often simply cannot find what I'm looking for (my card or the balance in a specific currency). Everyone I know using Revolut has the same complaint, especially older people like my parents or in-laws.
Valora Digital | Senior iOS | Full-time | Zurich, Switzerland | ONSITE or REMOTE (CET +- 2h)
Valora Digital[0] is the digital unit of Valora[1], a European retailer with 2700 stores across 5 countries. We are tackling interesting challenges in areas such as Autonomous Stores (think Amazon Go), E-commerce & Delivery, Loyalty, Payments and Process Improvement. For this purpose we are building up a development team from scratch. You will be one of the first engineers and will have a big part in shaping the culture as well as choosing our stack. We are looking to bring the startup ethos to the corporate world and get to combine the best of both worlds: ample funding, a huge customer base to deploy to and lots of freedom.
We are using Swift and SwiftUI to build a modular architecture that will underpin a portfolio of apps. I'm head of mobile and an iOS developer myself.
https://github.com/fphilipe
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/philipe; my proof: https://keybase.io/philipe/sigs/182uf1x4SUnMvtmLchInbgTL0X0b0qcRGe_g2T0KLDo ]