SGTM Especially in this day and age if the Claudes and Geminis of the world aren't following the template, it's likely not providing enough path shortening value.
I'm hesitant to just have an empty template, since the point of a template is to provide that guidance. People who do not read cannot be helped. That said, if we ensure the CONTRIBUTING.md guide has all the guidance and replace the template with a stern "THIS IS AN UNEDITED TEMPLATE, PR AUTHORS SHOULD REFER TO CONTRIBUTING.md AND PROVIDE A MEANINGFUL PR DESCRIPTION" warning instead, it'll be sufficient for people who read, while taking up much less space an the current template. Robert Burke On Tue, Sep 29, 2026, 7:06 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 >
