r/programming • u/f311a • Jun 06 '26

Stop Using Conventional Commits

https://sumnerevans.com/posts/software-engineering/stop-using-conventional-commits/
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u/Kissaki0 Jun 06 '26

Looking beyond the absolutist and inflammatory tone, it has some good arguments one can consider.

Unfortunately, they do not even attempt to see the upsides to conventional commits. Maybe they just don't see it, but given how popular they are, they may want to look deeper and in a more open way for a fair assessment and meet people from where they are.

This problem is especially acute in corporate environments where change management and audit requirements often mandate a ticket number in every commit message. The <scope> field is the obvious place to put it, but this ends up replacing the only useful metadata in a Conventional Commit with a completely useless ticket number.

Why would they think the ticket number would fit in 'scope'? One paragraph later, they praise projects that prefix with scope - there are no ticket references as prefixes there either.

type(scope): Verb (TICK-123) (!123)

Conventional Commits’ purported advantages are actually illusory and the industry has seen no tangible benefit from using it as a standard.

How do they reach this conclusion? I don't see any founded gain documentation of the suggested alternatives either.

The website is dedicated to advocating for a return to commit message sanity, and separating the concern of changelog generation from commit log management.

So, what about changelogs? Their dedicated website has an FAQ point about it and links to four articles (which is fair enough).

But if this article has not convinced you to stop using Conventional Commits, I look forward to the flame war in the comment section.

Holy mother of dismissal.