This is a team lead/CTO problem. A good leader will be explicit in their expectations that developers write good commit messages. I've certainly had good leaders that expect this.
Yes, and a culture problem, too. I guess I've been blessed that I've mostly only worked for "grown up" companies, but I've never encountered a workplace where people didn't write useful commit messages. At least one line description of the work done, but often multiple lines of valuable context. Only the junior devs had to be told to do it, but once they got into the habit, everyone understood why we do it and it was no big deal.
If I joined a company where people committed their code with "stuff" or "made some changes" or "asdfhlfo;ejfo;ae," that would be a red flag that I might have joined the wrong company, and I'd start to wonder what else the developers here do carelessly.
Indeed. If you can't spend two minutes (MAX) writing a sentence or two explaining what the commit is for, then what are we doing as developers? Commits are for future you and your future team. They are a tool. Please, use them.
Good commit messages would be nice but honestly I would be over the moon if our pull requests would be approved within a week without having to ping one or more people.
haha as if. I mostly do bugfixes, small features, and otherwise most of my PRs are just unit text fixes so that our CI jobs run again (because my colleagues don't seem to care about breaking tests, so I get to fix everyone's tests, so that QA doesn't go postal).
To put it into numbers: my PRs are usually less than 5 files changed, and very little changes in those files.
Because each job only runs once in the middle of the night when it detects any changes. Also a lot of our tests are very finicky and need to be restarted multiple times before they run successfully, so a failing test isn't necessarily an indication of bad code. On top of that, a lot of our tests are not actually testing anything useful, they are merely fulfilling the customer requirements from specifications - the only useful test for a lot of these requirements are full system tests, which are not easily automated since there are a lot of complex interconnected systems involved with expensive physical hardware that would not be easy to fake.
The same goes for code comments though people are much more vocal about their disdain. It's ironic given how frequent AI is used to generate docs. But docs are much better written by the person who wrote the code, the person who has all the context.
These things never take much time but people dismiss them because of that. Because each commit and each comment in isolation isn't very valuable but they are very helpful in aggregate. I'm not sure why this bias exists though, since the same is true for lines of code. It's also true about a ton of things. All the little things add up. Just because it's little now doesn't mean it's not important
I once tutored an intern. Who thought he was The Best Programmer On Earth (didn't we all at that age?).
He refused to use revision control, it slowed him down.
So we told him to commit at least once every day, with a relevant commit message, or else fail his internship.
He worked 21 more days. There were 21 commits: "17:00, time to go home".
This reads like the intern was left to his own devices and his output not checked at all for three weeks straight. Actual tutoring would have surfaced the issue after 1 or 2 days tops.
Oh, but I had a daily sit down and addressed this and other issues several times.
The problem was, as I mentioned, "he though he was the best developer ever". stubborn as hell. And pushed back against anything he wasn't used to, anything that wasn't his usual "ssh or ftp into prod and change stuff until it works" because he thought this was the only method that worked.
This was my first encounter with a self-proclaimed "10x" developer before that term existed. Someone who - as seen by far off management - seemingly have a high output, but in reality just create a trail of tech-debt and work for the rest of the team.
I am a CTO and I actually have very little patience for people that obsess over minor formatting issues (use a linter if you care), commit messages, and other fringe issues. If that's the biggest issue you have in a team, amazing. You are doing great. But you probably have bigger issues. The focus of the CTO is on the big picture stuff. Like staying on top of technical debt and correcting people when they keep on adding more of it. And making sure people learn from their mistakes, focus on the important things first, etc.
The thing with commit messages is that they are mostly never going to get a lot of scrutiny. But there are exceptions to this; especially if there are audits involved or external contributors. And of course when making a pull request to an OSS project, it is good form to make a bit of an effort. It depends on the context. I tend to focus more on diffs and pull requests. Not on the cryptic one liners that may or may not describe some of the changes. The right unit of change is a pull request, not individual commits.
And all this of course was when I was still able to keep on top of the massive volume of change. With AI that's simply no longer the case and the volume of change is only going to increase over time. Human reviews are now the main bottleneck to getting code merged. AIs probably should be doing a lot of the reviewing, gatekeeping testing, vetting, etc. Especially when AIs also produce most of the change. It's likely a lot of things will slip through unless you get your house in order on guard rails and process that your AI agents need to follow. As a CTO, guarding quality without becoming a human bottleneck is now the main challenge and removing bottlenecks responsibly is part of the job.
BTW. making AI tools write good commit messages is actually be a bit expensive. Many AI tools default to just summarizing the first message of a chat session under the assumption that just one thing changed over the course of a session. Making the AI look at the actual diff is of course possible and not that hard (just ask). And it definitely yields better descriptions when you do that. But it also takes more time and the token cost goes up as well. I'm not sure that's actually worth the expense in tokens. I tend to not bother with this. But again; depends on the context.
> The thing with commit messages is that they are mostly never going to get a lot of scrutiny. But there are exceptions to this; especially if there are audits involved or external contributors. And of course when making a pull request to an OSS project, it is good form to make a bit of an effort. It depends on the context. I tend to focus more on diffs and pull requests. Not on the cryptic one liners that may or may not describe some of the changes. The right unit of change is a pull request, not individual commits.
Why do you think OSS projects have a high bar for change descriptions? It's because some things matter for the long run.
Also, it's pretty clear from the context of this discussion that it's about the descriptions on pull requests (or other units of change like CLs) and not individual commits that get squashed in a PR/CL.
> BTW. making AI tools write good commit messages is actually be a bit expensive. Many AI tools default to just summarizing the first message of a chat session under the assumption that just one thing changed over the course of a session. Making the AI look at the actual diff is of course possible and not that hard (just ask). And it definitely yields better descriptions when you do that. But it also takes more time and the token cost goes up as well. I'm not sure that's actually worth the expense in tokens. I tend to not bother with this. But again; depends on the context.
All coding agents do that these days - they just run git diff and figure out what the change is when writing the commit message. Are you saying that writing a better change description is not worth the pennies it costs in tokens?
> The focus of the CTO is on the big picture stuff. Like staying on top of technical debt and correcting people when they keep on adding more of it. And making sure people learn from their mistakes, focus on the important things first, etc.
sound like something maybe good commit messages could help with
I don't agree. These things actually matter. A developer who isn't told otherwise is just going to do whatever they feel like, so if there is nothing or no-one enforcing the standards, then the failure isn't on the individual developer, it is on the team lead. Someone needs to be setting the standards.
In the company I work for, there is a team that has isolated itself to some extent from other teams and works at a furious pace to keep their particular section of the business happy. We're lucky enough that they spun up their own repo to do their work on, so they don't actually impact other teams, but if the quality of the commit messages is anything to go by, I am 100% certain they're going to end up in a huge mess, if they aren't already. The team lead encourages this, and certainly doesn't care about commit messages etc.
Developers who care about other developers tend to write better quality code, because they care what other developers think of them. If you care about other developers, you will most likely write decent quality commit messages too.
I have seen over many years the types of developers who only care about moving their own code into production as fast as possible and getting to the next thing. There is a very high correlation with a mess at the end, which they inevitably won't have to tidy up because they'll be doing the next thing. These types of developers hate owning stuff in production, so they don't do it, so they don't actually care how maintainable their "clever" code is. I am very certain that a number of people reading this will be those types of developers.
This sounds a lot like the tactical tornado archetype.
From A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout:
> Almost every software development organization has at least one developer who takes tactical programming to the extreme: a tactical tornado. The tactical tornado is a prolific programmer who pumps out code far faster than others but works in a totally tactical fashion. When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations, management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However, tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the tactical tornado.
Useless? So you never use “git annotate” or your IDE to see who wrote a line of code whose purpose puzzles you, and go to the commit message to see what they were trying to accomplish? This is invaluable to me as long as commit messages are clear.
As a manager, one of the first things I do is make sure that the PR titles (the PR text becomes the commit messages in squash-merging workflows) at minimum begin with a ticket number. Then we can later read both the intention and the commentary on it.
> you never use “git annotate” or your IDE to see who wrote a line of code whose purpose puzzles you, and go to the commit message to see what they were trying to accomplish? This is invaluable to me as long as commit messages are clear.
You're thinking like someone with a mature understanding of version control. Plenty of developers seem set on going their whole careers using git like beginners.
That sounds clever until you remember tools exist to solve actual problems.
Treating simple workflows as inferior is like saying a carpenter is amateurish for not using every attachment in the workshop. Some teams don't have enough upstream issues that they need to lean on git in the way you do maybe?
Think of a major FOSS project in a technically challenging domain. Every single one of them insists on proper version-control discipline. [0,1,2,3,4]
If enough of the following apply strongly enough to your project:
* Very small codebase
* A one-person project, or a very small team where everyone can be expected know the entire codebase and you don't bother with code-review
* Not doing anything technically challenging
* You don't care about the other advantages of disciplined version-control, such as the ability to meaningfully revert a commit, or to more easily associate a bug with a feature
then sure, you can get away with sloppy use of version control, or even no version control at all. The same applies to various other aspects of software development. Skillful structuring of code doesn't matter in a very small codebase. The drawbacks of dynamically typed languages aren't a real problem in small codebases. Documentation might not be worth writing up. The list goes on. It makes sense that there's generally less call for the various aspects of the 'craft' of software development in such projects. The same applies to other disciplines. You don't bother with CFD modelling for your paper airplane.
I'm not convinced there's really any upside to the sloppy approach though. Developers with the skill to write decent commit messages (plenty of developers lack this), and otherwise make skillful use of version control, tend to make it a habit and always apply the disciplined approach. It's like NASA's old rules for software: The rules act like the seat-belt in your car: initially they are perhaps a little uncomfortable, but after a while their use becomes second-nature and not using them becomes unimaginable. [5][6]
> Treating simple workflows as inferior is like saying a carpenter is amateurish for not using every attachment in the workshop
I see it differently: what I'm proposing is developing mastery over a core tool of the craft, and applying it consistently in our work. We'd expect the same from a competent carpenter or cook.
Again, in my experience, that isn't it. It's like NASA's rules. People who write garbage commit messages and have a chaotic and unconsidered version control workflow, generally lack the skill to do otherwise. As they lack version control skills, they haven't had the opportunity to internalise the benefits. Those with the skill to make disciplined use of version control tend to do so on every project, as the effort required is modest and is repaid even on minor projects.
We're talking about low-hanging fruit here. It's not like adopting the MISRA C programming style, which really does severely restrict the programmer.
Sloppy use of version control doesn't make you more effective. It just doesn't work that way.
Torvalds himself writes up proper commit messages even for his toy projects. [0][1] I really doubt it takes him much time or effort. You really think he's not pragmatic?
> Useless? So you never use “git annotate” or your IDE to see who wrote a line of code whose purpose puzzles you, and go to the commit message to see what they were trying to accomplish?
Personally no, the code is the "truth". If I need more I'm going to open a dialog with the author, not spend time trying to interpret a 7 word commit message, "good" or otherwise.
The code is the present truth, the commit messages can inform you about how it got turned into this truth. Interestingly, I recently wrote a short article about this: https://agateau.com/2026/on-commit-messages/
Your argument on conventional commits is something I've come to agree with. There are even tools that can generate release notes from conventional commits, and they are premised on the same mistake.
The code can only convey what is being done (and then, in some cases, only superficially). It can't convey what decisions were made, what alternatives were discarded, what business motivations may have led to that code.
And for old enough code, the author may not be available, or more likely doesn't remember.
Yes, we are on our third ticketing system on our team with dead refs to old issues. PR without a commit documenting why you need a change does not normally get approved and helps a lot also at present and future review time. Lots of value for new devs to see how thinking went and why something exist and not something else etc.
Documenting it also forces people to think why they are adding a change in the first place. Code added without purpose becomes dead weight and tech debt.
You'll at least need the discipline to include the ticket ID in the message. Links to documentation are ok, but they will likely rot and even if they don't the content may change such that it no longer accurately reflects the commit changes.
Look, I'll make this easy to understand. The parent comment that this stems from said:
> It can't convey what decisions were made, what alternatives were discarded, what business motivations may have led to that code.
If you're advocating this should all go in commit messages then I don't know what to say that I haven't already, it objectively doesn't belong there. The end.
I think we’re advocating for is that it contains a sufficient amount of context. Ideally it’s like “XYZ-123: Enable multi-foo support for Bar”
Links to ticket IDs are good, and good leaders don’t let old ticket links break on bugtracker migration.
A sentence or so to let future devs know what this change meant to do or at least what initiative it was intended to support, is also good. If future devs (even future YOU) don’t know what you were trying to do, they might revert a change which, without context, looks like a mistake.
Doing both ticket link + text is ideal because someone might screw up the ticket system, and a sentence on its own can be ambiguous.
Doing neither, on purpose, is just willful stupidity. Don’t even bother with Git if you want your commits, the ones that end up in “dev” I mean, to all just say “wip,” “asdf,” and “hope it works now.”
Sure but code can't capture everything. Maybe with enough comments I guess, but not code alone. For example, code won't tell you that this feature was timeboxed hence this edgecase was not supported
Having dumb or nonexistent commitment messages has 0% chance of communicating anything. If someone has at least made an effort, a future someone will be able to identify some of the following:
1. What project in general the change was associated with (it may not be obvious from the files changed in this single commit) which can indeed tell you how well it was spec’d- maybe you’ll even find the technical plan.
2. Possibly a hint of how the author intended it to work, or a clue about their misunderstanding. For example, the commit may have changed a function to accept a null argument to “solve” some other problem, but now you know that null passing through here is harmful, well thanks to the commit info, you know that you have to account for the problem that dev was “solving” if you don’t allow the null here. Without that you’d just revert the change and cause the other bug to regress.
I partially disagree. Technical leadership at the micro/mid level should be able to set and enforce standards like "you must have semi-meaningful or meaningful commit messages." If and only if they set those standards, and the team does not follow them, then we can say that either the leadership is lacking, or there is a structural barrier/disincentive to following the rules. Within that framework, I do think using process-smells like this is valid for judging technical leadership.
To the point of other commenters however, I wouldn't lay something this micro at the foot of the CTO in all but the smallest of organizations.
It's a stretch to lay at the CTOs feet, but not the team lead or even Head/VP of Engineering IMHO. It's also easy to "enforce" if you're already doing peer review (which you definitely should be, even if not required for compliance).
They are useless: Google Messages bothers me to upgrade to a new version. I read the changelog: "Bug fixes and performance improvements". Last time they did it it was full of bugs. Really Google: come back when you actually fixed something.
Obviously a very unpopular opinion, but I guess for my own sake it's hard to write commit messages, because for me it's that I have never really even found use of other people commit messages, and I rarely even attempt to. Ultimately code is code and I don't care about how it got to how it is. I got same issue with documentation and comments or really anything that isn't building stuff. I don't like writing it, don't like reading it either... ADHD?
So, before AI came and saved me from writing commit messages I had alias that ran the whole git add . && git commit -m ... && git push with a fixed commit message. But of course we had squashing so PR title was the one to eventually go there, so maybe that part is fine. But all my side projects had just that.
> Ultimately code is code and I don't care about how it got to how it is.
That's fine until you come up against something like a subscription system that's been built over 15 years by at least 20 different developers, none of whom are currently at the company, half of whom appear to have been clinically insane, each of whom had their own unique approach to code, with almost zero code commentary, zero external documentation, and abstractions layered like geological strata where you need 15 files open to understand one API endpoint.
As long as there’s some record, whether it’s PR or commit. At Google and Meta there’s no distinction, each commit is a PR (approximately) and has a description and discussion linked to it. I’ve found this really valuable for understanding a piece of code, maybe it’s just five lines but of there’s 200 words of discussion giving you more context on why it is that way.
Yeah I also don't really write commit messages. If your pull request becomes associated with that commit, and the history gets squashed, then that one commit becomes a link to the pull request where all the necessary info is. I just write "commit" for all my messages.
On my local copy of the repo, commits are notes to myself. I don't use the `--message` switch. I let git bring up my $EDITOR where I type what I did since the last commit. This helps when I'm writing the PR description and when I'm rebasing the branch on top of the main trunk. And then some time, I need to do a bit of git-fu and split the changes into different PRs. Hard to do this with generic messages.
But I use magit and I can commit specific lines and hunks as easily as files. That helps with managing changes to meaningfully group them.
It's such a breath of relief to finally hear people talking about this clearly and loudly. May it continue and may this bad behaviour have repercussions. Enough.
I'm also a Bose QC user and I can't speak highly enough about them. Best piece of tech that I ever bought. Going on three years now and they are still like new. I have three very loud, rambunctious kids and they are a life-saver.
It allows two devices to connect at the same time. I usually have my phone and my macbook hooked up to it all the time. Once in a while one of them will act badly and usurp full control over the bluetooth connection and I'll have to disconnect it. Super rare. For the most part the experience is seamless.
We've been building Doodledapp, a visual node-graph editor for Solidity (Ethereum). It's been really exciting to work on something genuinely interesting.
I'm not a Senior, but I'm not a Junior either. The market has no place for people like me. I've killed myself for almost two years and can't secure a position. It's incredibly disheartening. I have a family to feed. I need to be able to work.
Sending you empathy. I think we have to get used to the lower pay expectation. This is the biggest negative, which does not make up for all of the AI's upsides.
I've dropped my pay requirement into the basement. 60-70% pay decrease and it isn't enough. At some point I'm going to wonder if I'm ever going to work again.
I've been on a Macbook M1 Pro since 2022 (bought refurbished on Amazon for cheap) and it's still such a powerhouse. It doesn't struggle at all with anything that I throw at it. Kind of amazing.
Nothing has broken and I consistently get 4-6 hours of heavy work time while on battery. An amazing machine for the price I paid.
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