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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

It does sort of feel a bit cargo culty sometimes. I expect commit messages are situationally important, as a function of the size and maturity of the project, the size of the development team (esp. the amount of developer churn).

That said, there's probably some fringe benefit to describing what you do in some fashion. It's a great way of making sure you understand what's happening yourself.

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I find much more cargo cult in disregarding commit messages

How does that work? Like a cargo cult behavior is a ritual you do because you think it will bring about some good through unknown means. Disregarding commit messages is the absence of a ritual.

Disregarding is an action too (and I don't think you need a ritual in cargo cult behaviors)

The difference is that if disregarding commit messages has no effect, then it's still beneficial to do since you're saving effort vs writing elaborate commit messages.

In my experience in the long term, on average, you'll lose insanely much more time.

Deducing lost information (or trying to deduce it) often takes enormously much more effort than what it takes to write it down.

Maybe version control is a cargo cult, then? You might as well just make commits without commit messages if the revision comment is useless. Maybe just squash all commits between versions so you just have one commit per version.

This is a demonstrably faulty conclusion. Even without commit messages, version control lets you do things that you would not be able to do otherwise, such as to roll back a failed refactoring attempt, for example.

That is very possible to do. People overwrite their save data or their files without any VCS getting in the way.

It’s not like you need the history (is this a refactor or something else? doesn’t matter) so you don’t need to keep around such failed attempts.

It's still a substantial improvement to have known snapshots of the state of the code. It doesn't have to be in VCS, like you can roll it old school and save full zips of the code base, but snapshots are a tangible benefit that VCS offers that does not hinge in the slightest upon well written commit messages.

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