E.g. maybe you have your application open in a browser and are currently viewing a page with a very prominent red button. You hit that /issue command with "button should be yellow not red".
That half-sentence makes sense if you also have that open browser window as context, but would be completely cryptic without.
An AI could use both the input and the browser window to generate a description like "The background color of the #submit_unsafe button widget in frontend/settings/advanced.tsx should be changed from red to yellow." or something.
Sort of like a semantic equivalent to realpath if you want.
I do see utility in that.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just open the inspector, find the css class, grep the source code, and then edit the properties? It could be even easier in an SPA where you just have to find the component file.
there are a lot of people who are not programmers at all. I can teach my plumber everything you said (learning it myself is the easy part), but it will take years. In the end they just know "that button I'm pointing my finger at should be yellow not red". How to we transfer that pointed finger to a ticket is the question here.
There’s a reason the Support and IT Technician role exists. They’re there for talking to the end user. And they in turn will write a proper report to Engineering.
If you want to wear both hats at once, that is fine. If you want an agent to be your support middleman, that is also fine. But most LLM proponents are acting like it’s a miracle solution to some engineering bottleneck.
This can be a substantial effort, especially if you're not familiar with the project.
1. Clear steps to reproduce (ideally, using the prepared testcase as input, if applicable)
2. A description of the behavior observed from the program
3. A description of the expected behavior
4. Optionally, your justification for why the program should be changed to behave the way described in #3 and not #4
Everything else belongs on a message board, mailing list, or social media.
But this is all totally foreign to, like, 80% of GitHub's userbase (including the majority of the project managers aka maintainers who are in charge of allowing/disallowing the sorts of things that people post as a way of shaping the tone and tenor of the space).
There's a reason that collaborative code platform (not just GH but also GL) "issues" end up being used for much more than bugs:
- message boards suffer from the SSO friction issue. No thanks I will not sign up at some phpBB board of questionable admin quality that will get 0wned sooner than later, or have the board owner bombard me with advertising themselves.
- mailing lists are even worse usability-wise because these by design leak your email address, on top of that their management UI often enough is Mailman which means it probably still stores passwords in cleartext, and spam filters, attachment size limits and overeager virus scanners make it a living hell
- IRC suffers from context loss. Netsplit, go for a smoke and the laptop goes to sleep, whoops, you disconnected and don't see what happened in the meantime. Yes, there's bouncers, but honestly, the UX sucks hard. Also, no file transfers to a channel, no native screenshot/paste functionality.
- Discord, Slack etc. solve the pains of IRC but are walled gardens
- Social media... yikes. No, no, no. Eventually, people that follow both you and the author of some FOSS software get pissed off by your conversation spamming their feed. (Too) many are still only active on Twitter which excludes people who don't want to be on that hellsite. Bluesky, good luck finding non-commies there. Mastodon, good luck and pray that your instance operator and the instance operator of the project team didn't end up in some bxtchfight escalating in defederation. Facebook groups, not everyone wants to leak their real name.
- messenger groups (especially Telegram)... blergh. You will drown in spam.
GH/GL are the sweet spot between UX/SO friction (because pretty much everyone who would want to file an issue has an account) and features, and on top of that both platforms have deals with email providers preventing them from getting blocked. That's why these two platforms are so far superior above everything else mentioned.
GitHub is an SSO provider and has been for a long time. This criticism is ignorant.
Aside from that, there's nothing stopping anyone from using GitHub's dedicated message boards for message board stuff, or, before those existed, shunting it all off into the "issues" of a separate "$PROJECT/community-bullshit" "repo" instead of cluttering up the actual bugtracker.
> Social media... yikes. No, no, no.
I'm talking about the appropriate-for-social-media stuff people are already posting on GitHub issues. It's like you started writing your comment and lost the context. People are today already misusing GitHub issues for this. I'm saying keep the stuff best kept to social media and email... on social media and email. Don't clutter the bugtracker with it, and for project managers: don't let other users do it either. (You will lose contributors who know how to use a bugtracker efficaciously and are accustomed to it but have a fixed time budget and don't want to have to sift through junk for the privilege of doing free and thankless QA on your software.)
> You will drown in spam.
The irony. Help. It burns.
For emphasis: Everything that isn't a bug belongs on a message board, mailing list, or social media, and not on the bugtracker. Anyone who can't abide by this simple, totally reasonable request should be booted.
The problem is, a "sign up to contribute" is a friction source. It will almost always leak my email. In contrast, I'm already logged in to Github.
So does git and GitHub. Last I checked, authoring a git commit with an email address associated with your GitHub account is what makes GitHub attribute that commit to your account. I assume Gitlab works in a very similar way.
"But 'git clone' is soooo much harder than reading through mailing list archives!" Nah.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/reference/ema...
Oh, I was unaware of that. I've not seen anyone use it, [0] but I've only paid any attention to the Big Corporate and Traditional Hacker populations.
Thanks much for the information.
[0] I'm certain that folks do use it, so folks shouldn't bother pointing out people that do.
If you set user.email using git-config on your machine to a real email address and decide to author and publish commits with it, then GitHub will, of course, not be able to stop you (aside from maybe rejecting the commits when you tried to push them). It can't just arbitrarily rewrite the email address in the commit. That would break Git's data model.
> /issue you know that paint bucket in google docs i want that for tldraw so that I can copy styles from one shape and paste it to another, if those styles exist in the other shape. i want to like slurp up the styles
What kind of context may be there?
Also, the entire repository and issue tracker is context. Over time it gets only more complete.
Because it does. The goal here isn't to create good code, it's to create an impression of a person who writes good code. Even now, when software career is in freefall, for many people in poor countries it's still their only way out of poverty so they'll try everything possible to build a portfolio and get a job and the suffering of your little pet project isn't a part of the equation. Those people aren't trying to get Nobel prizes, they're trying to get any job that isn't farming with literal medieval-era technology.
My very radical personal opinion is that either we have small elitist circles of trust, or the internet will remain a global ghetto.