I learned more about a developer from reading three months of their commit messages than I did from reviewing six months of their code.
The code was competent—clean functions, reasonable abstractions, tests that passed. Standard mid-level work. But the commit messages told a completely different story. They revealed how this person thought through problems, made decisions under uncertainty, and communicated intent to future maintainers.
One commit said: "fix: resolve race condition in payment processing by adding mutex lock to transaction handler."
Another said: "fix bug."
Both commits changed roughly the same amount of code. Both solved real problems. But one revealed a developer who understood systems thinking and could articulate technical decisions. The other revealed... almost nothing.
Your commit messages aren't just documentation. They're a running transcript of your engineering judgment.
What Commit Messages Actually Communicate
Most developers treat commit messages as bureaucratic overhead—something required by CI/CD but fundamentally pointless. Write enough to satisfy the linter, move on. The actual value is in the code.
This is backwards.
Your code shows what you built. Your commit messages show why you built it that way, what alternatives you considered, what assumptions you made, and what tradeoffs you accepted. The code becomes obsolete as requirements change. The thinking behind the code remains relevant for years.
Good commit messages preserve decision context. Great commit messages teach systems thinking.
When you write "refactor: extract user validation logic into reusable service," you're documenting a specific architectural decision. Future maintainers learn that user validation was complex enough to deserve its own service, that reusability was a design goal, and that this wasn't premature abstraction—it was extraction from existing code.
When you write "update code," you've documented nothing except that something changed. The context lives only in your head until you forget it or leave the company.
The Levels of Commit Message Maturity
Commit messages reveal developer maturity more clearly than most interviews:
Level 1: The Minimalist
fix bug
update file
wip
stuff
These messages communicate active contempt for future readers. The developer treats commits as save points for their own work, not communication with collaborators. They either don't understand that git history is documentation, or they don't care.
Level 2: The Literal Describer
change variable name from x to userId
add function to handle user login
remove old comments
These messages describe what the code literally does—information already perfectly captured by the diff. They're not wrong, but they're redundant. They miss the opportunity to explain why the change matters.
Level 3: The Context Provider
refactor: extract validation logic for reusability
User validation was duplicated across login and registration
flows. Extracting to shared service reduces maintenance burden
and ensures consistent validation rules.
These messages provide context the code can't capture. They explain the problem being solved, the approach taken, and often the alternatives considered. They transform git history into decision documentation.
Level 4: The Systems Thinker
feat: add optimistic UI updates for post creation
Problem: Users experienced a 2-3 second delay after clicking
"post" while waiting for server confirmation. This felt sluggish
and reduced engagement.
Solution: Implement optimistic updates with rollback handling.
Post appears immediately in UI, then syncs with server response.
Tradeoffs: Increases client complexity (rollback logic) but
dramatically improves perceived performance. Risk of inconsistency
if server rejects post is mitigated by clear error messaging.
Related: #423 (user feedback on perceived slowness)
These messages don't just document—they teach. They reveal how the developer thinks about problems, evaluates tradeoffs, and makes technical decisions. Reading a hundred of these messages is like taking a masterclass in systems thinking from that developer.
The Patterns That Separate Good Engineers
Certain patterns in commit messages consistently correlate with engineering excellence:
They explain the "why," not just the "what." Every code change has a reason. Good commit messages articulate that reason clearly. "Fix race condition" is weak. "Fix race condition in payment processing caused by concurrent access to transaction state" is strong because it identifies both the symptom and the cause.
They document tradeoffs explicitly. Software engineering is fundamentally about tradeoffs. Great commit messages acknowledge this: "Using Redis cache improves read performance 10x but increases infrastructure complexity. Acceptable tradeoff given user-facing latency was primary complaint."
They connect changes to larger context. Referencing issue numbers, linking to design docs, citing user feedback—these connections transform isolated commits into a coherent narrative about how the system evolves.
They're written for future debuggers. When someone is trying to understand why the code works the way it does at 2 AM during an outage, your commit message is their primary documentation. Good messages anticipate these moments and provide the context that makes debugging faster.
They reveal what was tried and didn't work. "Initially attempted to solve with caching but cache invalidation proved too complex. Switched to denormalization for simpler consistency guarantees." This kind of message prevents future developers from repeating failed experiments.
The AI-Assisted Commit Message Revolution
Writing great commit messages consistently is cognitively expensive. After implementing a complex feature, the last thing you want to do is write a thoughtful explanation of your decision-making process.
This is where AI assistance transforms the practice.
Instead of writing commit messages from scratch, use tools like the Rewrite Text tool to transform quick notes into clear, structured messages. Draft a rough commit message capturing your thinking, then let AI help you structure it for clarity and completeness.
The Improve Text tool becomes valuable for refining technical communication—taking your stream-of-consciousness explanation and turning it into crisp documentation that future maintainers will appreciate.
For complex architectural changes, the Business Report Generator can help structure your commit message to include all relevant context: problem statement, solution approach, tradeoffs considered, and impact on the system.
When you need to explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders through commit messages, the Email Assistant helps translate technical details into clear business context without losing precision.
The AI Tutor approach works well for commit messages too—explaining your change in teaching mode forces you to articulate your thinking clearly, which naturally produces better documentation.
Using Crompt AI's multi-model approach, you can compare how different models structure your commit message—GPT-5 for clarity and readability, Claude Sonnet 4.5 for technical precision, Gemini 2.5 Pro for comprehensiveness. The synthesis usually produces better documentation than any single approach.
The Template That Works
Most developers don't write good commit messages because they don't have a structure to follow. Here's a template that works across most commits:
<type>: <concise description>
Problem:
What issue prompted this change? What wasn't working?
Solution:
How does this change address the problem?
Tradeoffs:
What alternatives were considered? Why this approach?
Impact:
What parts of the system are affected? What should reviewers focus on?
References:
Issue numbers, design docs, related PRs
Not every commit needs every section. Bug fixes might be:
fix: prevent null pointer exception in user profile rendering
Problem: User profiles with missing avatar URLs crashed the app
Solution: Add null check and default avatar fallback
Impact: Affects all profile pages. Safe change with fallback logic.
Fixes #892
While architectural changes get the full treatment:
refactor: migrate user authentication to JWT tokens
Problem: Session-based auth didn't scale horizontally. Every
request required server-side session lookup, creating bottleneck.
Solution: Implement JWT with refresh token rotation. Auth state
now embedded in token, eliminating server-side session storage.
Tradeoffs:
- Increases client payload size (~200 bytes per request)
- Cannot instantly revoke tokens (max 15min lifetime mitigates)
- Requires token refresh logic on client
- Dramatically simplifies horizontal scaling
- Reduces database load by 40% (measured in staging)
Impact:
- All auth middleware updated
- Client libraries need token refresh implementation
- Database migration removes session table
- Backwards compatible for 1 release cycle
References:
- Design doc: docs/auth-migration.md
- Performance testing: #445
- Security review: #450
The Downstream Effects
Well-written commit messages compound in value over time:
Code reviews become faster and more meaningful. Reviewers can understand intent from the commit message before diving into code. Questions shift from "what does this do?" to "is this the right approach?"
Debugging becomes archaeological. When tracking down why something works the way it does, git blame with good commit messages is like having the original developer sitting next to you explaining their thinking.
Onboarding accelerates dramatically. New team members can read through git history to understand not just what the codebase does, but how it evolved and why architectural decisions were made. The commit log becomes a learning resource.
Technical debt becomes visible. When commit messages document tradeoffs and temporary solutions, future developers can identify what was meant to be refactored later versus what was designed to last.
Documentation writes itself. Architecture decision records, system evolution narratives, and debugging guides can often be extracted directly from well-written commit histories.
The Practice of Thoughtful Commits
Writing better commit messages is a practice, not a skill you acquire once:
Commit atomically. Each commit should represent one logical change—one bug fix, one feature, one refactoring. When commits are focused, commit messages become easier to write because there's one clear story to tell.
Write commit messages before committing. Draft your message while the context is fresh, even if you don't commit immediately. This practice often reveals that your changes aren't as focused as you thought.
Review your own commit messages. Before pushing, read through your commit messages as if you're a future developer trying to understand what changed and why. If you can't understand your own message, neither will anyone else.
Learn from great commit messages. When you encounter a particularly clear, helpful commit message, analyze what makes it effective. Is it the structure? The level of detail? The way it explains tradeoffs? Steal those techniques.
The Career Leverage
Your commit messages are more visible than you think. They're reviewed during pull requests. They're read during debugging sessions. They're discovered during git blame investigations. They're examined during promotion discussions.
Developers known for clear, thoughtful commit messages get trusted with more complex work. Leadership assumes—correctly—that someone who communicates technical decisions clearly in commit messages will communicate well in design reviews, incident reports, and architectural discussions.
The habit of writing good commit messages forces you to think clearly about your work. You can't write a clear commit message if you don't understand why you made the changes you made. The practice of articulating your thinking in commit messages actually improves your engineering judgment.
The Future Is AI-Assisted Documentation
We're moving toward a world where AI helps maintain consistent, high-quality commit messages automatically. Not by writing them for you—by helping you articulate your thinking more clearly and consistently.
The developers who start building this practice now—using AI to enhance rather than replace their documentation—will have a significant advantage. They're building a skill that compounds: clear technical communication, preserved in git history, teaching everyone who reads it.
Your code might get rewritten five times. Your commit messages will live forever in git history, teaching future developers how you thought about problems.
Make them count.
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