> 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?