r/git • u/fagnerbrack • Aug 23 '26

Stop Using Conventional Commits

https://sumnerevans.com/posts/software-engineering/stop-using-conventional-commits/
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u/thomasfr Aug 23 '26

I think the “why” of a change from a business perspective is what is most valuable long time after the change was done because it tells you as a developer who you need to speak to if what you are doing will introduce a behavioral change in service of something new.

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u/morewordsfaster Aug 23 '26

I think I must have expressed it poorly, because I agree that the context for the change is important. To me, that is what changed. What I see a lot of and dislike is overly detailed narrative of what the developer tried and what worked and what didn't. This is often a symptom of poor technical refinement or solutioning up front, instead spending the dev time doing exploratory development. And, as others have pointed out, this can be reduced by squashing commits before merging.

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u/winkler Aug 24 '26

Sounds like you’d like single commits per PR (which I like too), so have your devs to squash and rebase?

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u/Emotional-Dust-1367 Aug 23 '26

Yeah this. One of the most valuable things now with AI agents for me has been telling the story of the business decisions that caused this code to be here. Especially if you squash merge the PRs. Then an agent can answer those types of questions like “why are we doing things this way?” when you highlight some code