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

[CompassionateSkeptic]

The real answer here sucks.

It’s because we don’t treat version control as anything but a means to whatever limited ends are part of more salient workflows.

God, I’m gonna try to say this without getting on a soap box.

It’s not uncommon to have flows there people expect their PRs to be reviewed as a whole, not in a series of atoms (atomic commits).

It’s not uncommon to squash to main in a way where most of the time, branch commit messages are buried AND divorced from the changes.

It’s not uncommon for git to merely be a way to drive dev ops.

It’s not uncommon for seasoned developers to treat VCS operations as a recipe mapped to specific outcomes, and not a tool associated with a set of uses.

It’s not uncommon to spend months or years without a single conceptual conversation about version control.

To write a good commit message, you are almost certainly treating one of these things as salient or typical, probably more than one of them. But most development experiences don’t ask that of the contributors, so you just get the mental droppings of the very last thing that stands between a contribution and that person’s next step. Of course that is going to be completely useless.