Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I get that a lot. I don't believe in commit messages. I know that 99% of developers are disturbed by this, but I think it's the best way to work so I'm willing to deal with people not liking it.

View on HN

Why do you think it's best to give no indication of what was changed by a particular commit? While I feel strongly against this, I'm really asking out of genuine curiousity, not to bash whatever seems to be working for you :)

I could write an entire article about this (possibly someday I will), but to explain it briefly: I feel it hurts my creative process to have to take the time to write these commit messages at every commit. It's making me not want to commit. I treat a commit as an extended save operation, so unconsciously avoiding saving is definitely not something you want to do. I know most people would object to my use of a commit as an extended save, but I stand by that opinion as well, especially in these days of deploy-by-commit systems like Heroku. Sometimes I make commits that are smaller than a commit message would be so having to write a message will be a big waste.

Also, commit messages are a form of documentation; but they are one of the least useful ones. Much less useful in my opinion than docstrings, topical guides, references and blog posts. So I think that spending time on them is a much lower priority than spending time on the other kinds of documentation.

Thanks for sharing. When I want to commit but it's not a useful unit of work, I'll occasionally just commit with a WIP message and then amend the commit as necessary until it's done and write a real message.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com