I personally find this to be a substantially better pattern. That squashed commit also becomes the entire changeset - so from a code archeology perspective it becomes much easier to understand what and why. Especially if you have a team culture that values specific PRs that don’t include unrelated changes. I also find it thoroughly helpful to be able to see the PR discussions since the link is in the commit message.
I agree, much as it's a loss for git as a distributed system (though I think that ship sailed long ago regardless). As far as unrelated changes, I've been finding that another good LLM use-case. Like hey Claude pull this PR <link> and break it up into three new branches that individually incorporate changes A, B, and C, and will cleanly merge in that order.
One minor nuisance that can come up with GitHub in particular when using a short reference like #123 is that that link breaks if the repo is forked or merged into something else. For that reason, I try to give full-url references at least when I'm manually inserting them, and I wish GitHub would do the same. Or perhaps add some hidden metadata to the merge commit saying "hey btw that #123 refers to <https://github.com/fancy-org/omg-project/issues/123>"
Yep - we do exactly the same with Claude. In fact - part of our PR review automation with Claude includes checking whether the PR is tightly scoped or should be split apart. I’d say in about 80% of the cases the Claude review bot is accurate in its assessment to break it up? It’s optional feedback but useful - especially when we get contributors outside our immediate team that maybe don’t know our PR norms and the kinds of things we typically aim for.
Yeah I usually default to just a straight up link or a markdown link. Mostly because I usually don’t know the exact number of a PR/ticket/issue - so it’s easy to just copy the URL once I’ve found it.
