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Quoting Kenton Varda

Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-07-08

Cloudflare engineer Kenton Varda announces a team ban on AI-generated PR and commit messages, arguing that AI descriptions describe visible code details while omitting the high-level framing reviewers actually need.

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Topics: ai-assisted-programmingcode-reviewdeveloper-tooling

Claims

  • AI-written change descriptions consistently describe low-level code details that are already visible in the diff rather than the higher-level intent that aids code review.
  • Kenton Varda declared a moratorium on AI-generated PR descriptions, commit messages, issues, and tickets across his team.

Key quotes

AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be seen by looking at the code, but omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing.