Ello Ello.
Can you recommend a program with which I can generate commit messages locally? I DO NOT want an LLM local or cloud API. What I want is a tiny or small language model. If I could easily swap or customize the model for each project, it would be better, too. So I could have smaller models for specific projects. I can do the training meself.
Thanks in advance!
Not aware of such a thing. For the commit message to mean anything, it needs to understand what you did. And that requires some level of “intelligence”. Do it yourself, reference a user story or issue report or use a small large language model.
Where do you draw the line between Large LM and a non-large LM? You can fit Gemma models into 8GB VRAM or even way less:
How the hell is 8GB a small amount for a side utility? Are you using LLMs to count to 50?
Its small in the sense it’ll run on basically any GPU from the last decade, rather than high end or specialised GPUs. And there is a 1GB gemma4 model, which is meant for CPU/phones.
8GB means around 8B parameters. It’s no where near small. I meant the classic language models before LLMs existed. Something which I can easily execute on CPU to generate the commit messages.
And here, I’m not asking for “what model” rather “what utility” which uses such these models. Finding or training a model is much easier than maintaining such a software and keeping it useful.
the classic language models before LLMs existed
Which models are you referring to here? Earlier versions of GPT (like GPT-2)?
There are small LLMs like Phi 4 Mini that you could look at. Those were part of the “small language model” craze (SLMs).
If you want meaningful commit messages though, nothing beats handwritten messages. Commit frequently and the messages should be short and easy to come up with.
https://victorzhou.com/blog/better-profanity-detection-with-scikit-learn/
That might be of interest to you then? Its a small model trained for profanity detection, might work for your use case. Dunno if it can be used for generation though.
Otherwise, there were 1GB gemma models, you can run them on CPU.
The LM in LLM stands for language model
Could always just use something like https://www.whatthecommit.com/
I want meaningful commit messages pal :)
why generate commit messages? they are notes to yourself about what you have done and why. they don’t need to be more than a single line.
I’ve once worked on a project where your commits to your dev branch were supposed to be helpful to colleagues for reviews, but they had to be squashed for the feature branch, with comments adhering to the conventional commit “standard”. On the other side of it, there was a horrible pedant of a middle manager, who was rejecting merges based on (debatable) “misformats”.
This affected billing. They supposedly had some scripts evaluating merge requests, and they’d shrug and say “the script rejected it”. This was before LLMs. Come to think of it, they’re probably replaced by an LLM now, prompted by the customer to “try to defraud and fuck with the workforce on every commit”.
So to sum up, maybe OP’s in some sort of corporate hell, or maybe they want a bit more than going
git commit -mevery time.they are not notes to meself when there are others in the project. And the commit message is not always one line. Sometimes it’s more. And even if it is one line, it is still annoying to manually type for everything and every change.
but that’s your job. document the rationale of your changes for others.
