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.
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.