Commit messages generation

[vldF]

Validations

• I believe this is a way to improve. I'll try to join the Continue Discord for questions
• I'm not able to find an open issue that requests the same enhancement

Problem

There are at least one approach of this feature — #5828. However, this PR was closed based on technical reasons (I guess). This issue is target to discuss automatic commit messages generation one more time.

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This feature can solve next problems:

1. Sometimes, changes aren't simple enough to write clean and expressive text and developers write something like 'fix', 'make it work' and so on. It can be fine in some cases, but it breaks the git history navigation
2. In some teams there are rules for git commit messages. Some of them are about their syntax (like this on), others are about style
3. English isn't primary language for many developers, but as far as they work on open source projects, they try their best on it and sometimes other devs can't understand their texts right

LLMs are good enough to generate commit messages based on code changes to solve (1). They can use prompts to follow the rules to achieve (2). Also, most of LLMs are trained on english texts, so, they can solve (3). Consequently, we can use them to generate commit messages

Solution

We need a way to set custom rules/templates/examples. Continue already has rules and prompts. Probably, we can extend the schema of one of them. As far as I can see, prompts are yamls, so, they looks as a pretty good base for this feature. However, this can be not the best option, I just try to save the continue UI as simple as possible. Probably, we need to extent UI by add the new one tab on the Continue panel (like 'Prompts' and 'Rules')

Then, we can add some button to the commit panel of IDE to start the message generation. We can do it in IntelliJ IDEA, probably, we can integrate with some VS Code extensions

[Igorgro]

#6959

[vldF]

that's cool, however, I can't see any IntelliJ related code here. Do you know is it planned in this PR?

[aaudin90]

Other plugins already have this functionality, why was the merge request closed?

Let's discuss the nuances and one of us will take the task to work.

[vldF]

yeah, I have asked it in the discord 5 minutes ago

[Igorgro]

@vldF I have no discord access for now. Have you received any answer?

[vldF]

@Igorgro, no, there are no any answers

[vldF]

CC @RomneyDa

[TyDunn]

Our recommended approach is to use Agent mode to generate a message and commit (with Ask First turned on). A GUI for this would be nice, but at this point, we feel the difference in UX is not worth implementation and maintenance requirements for us. We might revisit this in the future, but this is our current view

[vldF]

Thanks for the answer

[bdougie]

Our recommended approach is to use Agent mode to generate a message and commit (with Ask First turned on). A GUI for this would be nice, but at this point, we feel the difference in UX is not worth implementation and maintenance requirements for us. We might revisit this in the future, but this is our current view

cn -p "generate a commit based on unstaged changes" - this would be our suggestion moving forward.

Also looking for feedback on this. #7307