this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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honestly, i hate having a form for my coworkers to fill out. i’ve done it before. i’ve seen it done. i prefer my collaborators, especially in a work environment to do the professional thing and give me enough context to understand the change. i don’t want to have to treat my coworkers like half interested children, but that temptation is always there. a bunch of “did you do your homework?” check boxes feels condescending by proxy. we don’t need a check box for “are the tests passing?” cuz we have automated tests and CI.
i prefer something that just nudges people in the right direction if i can get away with it.
just this week i added a template that read like:
You aren't treating them like children. That's just projection because you know what you want from a PR and feel like someone telling you what they want is belittling you. Not everybody wants the same nor has the same expectations from a PR.
Guidelines and rules exist for this very reason: people are different. Adding a CONTRIBUTING.md isn't treating somebody like a child and PR templates neither.
the CONTRIBUTING.md document has always existed and contains our guidelines. they know what we’ve agreed upon belongs in a PR, and they simply don’t do it. i’d rather have an empty description than a big stupid ignored form template, because the problem isn’t they don’t know but that they don’t care. that’s a problem that forms, in my experience, don’t fix.
@chrash0 @onlinepersona That's a thing I got told back in university: Technology cannot solve social problems (which is quite frustrating, at least in this case...)