I find the template useless for my own work, and I don't think it helps me review changes from committers. But I do wonder if it is helpful for new contributors (IMO this is who the feature is for).
My (unsubstantiated) opinion is that: 1. It is useless for most people, but also harmless 2. It probably sometimes helps new contributors Given that, I'd vote to leave it, but I don't care very much. Thanks, Danny On Tue, Sep 29, 2026 at 2:06 PM Kenneth Knowles <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > For discussion: https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/40339 > > I just reviewed yet another pull request that has the description "PLEASE > add a meaningful description here" from the template, just left there. > > > - Since 2026-01-01 it looks like 370+ PRs have left the template > without modifying it [unmodified]. > - There are a total of about 1800 non-dependabot PRs in the same time. > [total] > - In fact, of the 1430 others, quite a few are just blank or just say > "Fixes #<issue>" so I would round up to 25% "blank" descriptions. > > So my thoughts on this: > > - A rate of 75% of people actually describing their change is probably > satisfied by the null hypothesis: this many people would do it without any > template begging them to do it) > - A fully blank PR field might even be *more* likely to be edited. > - The other stuff in the template is really mostly noise, or should be > automation. (like choosing a reviewer or the CI status badges) > - A lot of PRs now have their description written by an LLM, or taken > directly from the commit text (also written by LLM) so we don't need the > template. > - We could have an LLM check if they actually added a description and > fail the check, (with a shortcut for totally unmodified description, > or tiny edit distance, that uses zero tokens) > > WDYT? > > I'm just in a "cleaning up extra / old stuff" mood lately. > > Kenn > > [unmodified] > https://github.com/apache/beam/pulls?q=is%3Apr+state%3Aclosed++created%3A%3E%3D2026-01-01+%22add+a+meaningful+description%22 > > [total] > https://github.com/apache/beam/pulls?q=is%3Apr+state%3Aclosed++created%3A%3E%3D2026-01-01+-author%3Aapp%2Fdependabot >
