alt Hacker News> I've never seen someone write decisions or the intent they started with in commit messages
You may not have seen enough good repos. The following is an example commit from freebsd
https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=ac5ff2813027c385f903...
A proper email is like an email. You have the first line as the subject and it may be enough to explain the intent of the diff. But sometimes it’s not enough and you add more details in the body. I strongly believe that people who write the WHAT again don’t know that there’s a diff attached to the commit and think of them a separatete objects. GitHub and VSCode do not really help in that regard.
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This looks very good. Thanks for sharing. I can only imagine how much discipline it takes to write these kinds of commits manually.
I think this requires discipline. The good thing is that we have coding agents, but again, you need a standard to tell the agent what to always look for, how to find it, and to describe your modules properly (even Claude Opus 4.6 makes mistakes when doing hops when tracing code spanning files). Btw, there is also a paper on this issue, Google released it recently
> The following is an example commit from freebsd
The Linux kernel is another great example. Random commit from yesterday:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d56b5d163458c45ab8f...