Your git log is a story. Each commit message is a sentence in that story. When the messages are thoughtful, the history becomes a powerful debugging and onboarding tool. When they are lazy, the history becomes noise.
What Makes a Good Commit Message
A good commit message answers three questions: What changed? Why did it change? What effect does the change have? The subject line should be imperative and under 72 characters. The body should provide context that the diff alone cannot convey.
Common Anti-Patterns
“Fixed stuff.” “WIP.” “asdfasdf.” We have all written these. But every vague commit is a future debugging session made harder. Take thirty seconds to write a real message. Your future self — and your teammates — will thank you.
Conventions like Conventional Commits can help, but the real goal is communication, not format compliance.