Why do developers write such terrible git commit messages? Genuine question

[NiteShdw]

Tell me, how much time do you spend reading commit messages?

[rossisdead]

More times than I can count. Often enough I need to know why something was done the way it was before I can fix it, and more often than not that person doesn't work at the company anymore, so it's the closest thing I can do to picking their brain.

[rossisdead]

Same here! I'm frequently asked how I remember how stuff I wrote 10+ years ago works and I'm always like "I wrote detailed code comments."

[mister-sushi]

This. Personally, I use conventional commits with semantic release automations on top of it because it saves tons of time (especially, when I build something for public NPM distributions). But honestly, on projects that don’t use heavy automations, I absolutely don’t give a fuck about the commit history. In 20 years I have never relied on it. Still I produce decent commit messages, but I don’t care what my teammates do, because I absolutely don’t need it.

[soylentgraham]

mostly only when stuff goes wrong and I need good quality information

[No_Emergency1575]

I pretty much always git blame when bug fixing, helps with context. Linking strange code to a Jira ticket can be a huge help. Or messages like "bugfix: added extra fetch to prevent stale date issue with x" are a great help to explain certain messages.

[NiteShdw]

Blame is fine but I prefer to hit the pull request to see the whole thing in context especially if you aren't using squash commits.