Hi,
I think the template is a little too much verbose, but otherwise it is
useful (agree, mostly for new contributors, but that is the point of
it). I would not go with replacing "PLEASE" with a text that should be
more unpleasant, because our interest should not be to create friction,
but the other way around - trying to invite people in.
I'll leave it as is or we can shorten it, but I'd keep the spirit.
Jan
On 9/29/26 21:07, Valentyn Tymofieiev via dev wrote:
I noticed new contributors often mention their changes in CHANGES.md,
a hint they likely picked up from the template. Contributor tips seem
useful too, so I'd rather keep the template. We can clarify or
shorten to only keep what's useful.
On my PRs I usually delete the template and write my own description.
> I just reviewed yet another pull request that has the description
"PLEASE add a meaningful description here" from the template, just
left there.
PRs should have a meaningful description unless the title explains
everything. I would encourage asking the author to add one or edit the
description before merge.
We could also change the "PLEASE line" into smth like:
<Replace this template with PR description unless self-explanatory
from title> to make it less unpleasant when people ignore it.
On Tue, Sep 29, 2026 at 11:43 AM Jack McCluskey via dev
<[email protected]> wrote:
A lot of the boilerplate is largely for new contributors. Leaving
or removing the boilerplate isn't going to make a difference to
the regular contributors but could add some friction to new ones.
That being said, it's pretty annoying as a code reviewer to get a
pull request witha title and no other context. I'm not asking for
the overwritten, fully formatted LLM PR summaries, but a quick
explanation of what intent of the PR is would be helpful. It would
be great if Beam contributors as a whole could be more consistent
in that effort... I worry that ditching the template will further
encourage the pattern of PRs only coming with titles.
So my opinion is "leave it and try to be more active as a
community in writing PR descriptions" without enforcing it via
infrastructure.
On Tue, Sep 29, 2026 at 2:25 PM Danny McCormick via dev
<[email protected]> wrote:
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
