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!
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:
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/quantization-aware-training-gemma-4/
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.
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.
Commit messages are for sure short and easy to come up with, already. The problem’s typing some common stuff every single time.
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.
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.
Gotcha. Sorry for being snarky.
You’re not wrong though, even 1GB is quite lot for writing commit messages, I gave it a quick go, and it takes around 15-30s to analyse a very small diff. Kinda silly for git messages.
Thanks for letting us know. Yeah sure. It’s not worth it. I personally take about 10s to write the commit message. So such a thing will just make it worse.
For shits and giggles, I had a go at writing a script that could rewrite all the commits in a branch with LLM generated commits. Couldn’t work out how to do the commit changing, tried cherry picking, but it doesnt work well for conflicts (had no idea that was possible). But, I can report timings at least.
On my M1 16GB macbook air, each commit was summarised in about 10s. So its a plausible approach if you just do all your commits, and then run a script to fix up the messages, go get a glass of water and you’ll come back to automatic messages.
If it’s of interest to you, I can share the script, its a starting point, but I am pretty ashamed of it :D