> So even when you have a nicely structured commit history, you end up realizing that some things need to be changed and start appending a bunch of "fix" and "actual fix" commits at the end.
I have found that this no longer needs to be an issue with agentic coding tools.
Once I am happy with the end state of a branch, I tell Claude to rebuild the change from scratch as a set of atomic incremental commits. It adds about 2 minutes to the dev process, but creates a pr that is infinitely easier to review.
The overall thrust of the article is great, though. The tooling around prs needs a ton of attention.
It takes barely longer than that to do manually, the extra time really just being the typing out of the commit messages. Folks should have been doing this all along and it still shocks me to discover that they haven't been. However, I don't immediately dislike the idea of people using agents to do it, even though I'm sure it will occasionally introduce some strange choices and not fully capture the intention behind any given choice.
I have found that this no longer needs to be an issue with agentic coding tools.
Once I am happy with the end state of a branch, I tell Claude to rebuild the change from scratch as a set of atomic incremental commits. It adds about 2 minutes to the dev process, but creates a pr that is infinitely easier to review.
The overall thrust of the article is great, though. The tooling around prs needs a ton of attention.