As programmers I feel like we'll always nitpick and bitch over what the optimal setup is for rather mundane things (tabs v spaces, yada yada).

I'm not saying that conventional commits are God's given best way to structure a commit message, but they are a defined structure, and I find it much more effective and important that some expectations be set around commit messages, and I think conventional commits are as good as anything.

Like the author is making a big deal that they think scope is more important than type. I may tend to agree, but I think the difference between "fix(compiler)" and "compiler fix" is not exactly a hill I'd be willing to die on.

The tech industry has tons of things that became standards even if they weren't optimal. E.g. if one were starting from scratch I think any sane person would argue JSON should support comments (sorry but Douglas Crawford's rationale for not including comments never made sense to me), better defined numeric formats, etc. But it was better in many contexts than what came before it, so it became the standard. I could believe that there is some other format that differs a bit from conventional commits that is a little better, but not really better enough to want a whole other competing way of structuring comments.

The real takeaway is that different projects have different requirements.

In over 30 years of using source control, I've never once worked on something where it's useful to include the component (article calls it scope) in the description in a standardised way. It's obvious what components are affected based on where in the source tree the affected files are. Similarly "bug", "fix" or "feature" adds no useful value. It's important or it wouldn't be checked in.

The only thing I've found useful, and which the article doesn't even consider, is a link / id for the relevant change request. The commit already contains all the information about what was done in the change, what's missing is the context about why.

Even on my solo projects I include a JIRA reference in square brackets before the description. If it's just something I randomly decided to fix during the course of development, I'll create a short 1 line JIRA to get an id and explain the why there.

The use of the word "chore" in many users of conventional commits has always riled me. I've always tended to favour the "linux kernel"[0] style of commit subject, which thankfully gets a mention here.

[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v7.0/process/submitting-patc...

My main complaint with conventional commits always was that they don't include an issue number in the commit title. It's not even mentioned in their standards as optional or something.

To me this is almost the most important information in a commit message. I don't know how often in the last 15 years I was cross checking the issue description referenced by some old commit to get the full context of a change. I also felt that this habit is kind of standard - until i had to learn about "conventional commits".

I never got the hype.

I totally agree with the sentiment behind this, so much so that I also made my own standard a while ago, https://commits-with-character.org/ an incredibly light addition to the Git Book guidelines, and also gives more priority to scope. It’s been working really well for me in my small projects.

I quite dislike this style of writing titles. "Stop something". I seems very popular. It sounds very commanding and "I am definitely right about this". Why not write "In favour of something" or "A case against something" or something like that?

I personally like it for one of my work projects. Its the only one we use it on. Its a repo with the android and iOS app. I like the conventional commits because when doing releases, I can look between two tags and pick out what I need to put in the "What's new in this release" section. I try to not just do the normal, "bug fixes and various improvements," in that section, but what we actually did. Also helping make clear what went into a release branch/what needs to be cherry picked into a release branch. I also don't automate the generation of the "Whats new" section. I just take a look at all the commits between tags.

We also tend to do something like

bug-ios: <case name>

feat-android: <case name>

So we don't have generic stuff like

bug-ios: fix memory issue

The thing conventional commits are really helpful for is continuous delivery. Every merge to main can be automatically tagged with semver and shipped because the thought that goes into tagging and versioning has already been done by the developers when they wrote the commit message.

I fully recognise that it doesn't make sense for huge projects like the Linux kernel to do this. But for 99% of projects conventional commits combined with semver vastly improves the release process status quo and makes it easy to automate.

Want machine-readable? Use the footers/trailers.

I can not say anything nice about conventional commits. The format takes up space in the most-read part of the message. The categories or types have little information. They can be replaced with an honest English verb embedded in the subject like a sentence. It also reads way better with just a sentence instead of three kinds of punctuation (:, (), !). Okay, I can tolerate an "area" in the subject. And that predates this conventio.

At my dayjob we make a webapp for non technical people. I can write a changelog for that just fine (in norwegian). The commit messages are irrelevant to the users. And demanding that all commits should be good enough for an end-user changelog? That's not happening for us anytime soon.

Use footers/trailers instead.

“The audience of a changelog is entirely different than the audience for a commit log!

A changelog is user-facing”

I'd say that ship has probably sailed. Most companies are happy with “Bug Fixes & Performance Improvements”. At least if they're not going to put the effort in, then a generated changelog is better than nothing.

Odd. The main reason to use this style of commit message is for CI/CD automation.

EDIT: I didn't see this covered in the article on my first pass. It is covered though. My apologies.

The type of the commit informs the automated workflows how to handle the commit. This is why it comes first.

For example, if you're performing CD, if you only commit a bunch of `fix: ` then only your semantic versioning patch version number is incremented. If you commit a `feat: ` then it's a minor version is bump. `feat! ` is a major version bump.

Even if you're not using CD for releases, semantic commit messages are sometimes used to automate change log generation. Granted, your change logs should not typically include the Git commit messages themselves — those are developer facing, not user facing.

I'd much rather people think deeply about summarizing their work. This helps others understand it but, more importantly, helps the developer understand what they did. If its hard to summarize, maybe it should be tightened up a little for instance. Enforcing a "schema" might help a tiny bit but also can cause people to check out a little as it can feel like just another meaningless process.

The best commit message: is what is meaningful to a future you 1 week from now, no further otherwise takes up the least time to think about right now

I used and use Conventional Commits in private and professional projects and I think they have a place.

That being said, when I finally committed to using them something in me broke. Most of my career work was double faced. One face to the customer where you need to keep Tatemae under all circumstances (UI, Tickets, etc.). The other was the code and commit messages where you still kept your professionalism but you could be open and speak the language of your peers.

This time is over, maybe for good, but a tiny part of me misses it.

Thank you for the thorough write up! I just thought about this today and needed the set of arguments and examples you brought forward. Especially the pointers to NixOS et.al. were informative. Thanks!

I like using conventional commits but I’ve often wondered if some sort of tagging/labeling using git-notes wouldn’t be better: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes

I’m just unsure that the short title is the ideal place to put this kind of tagging info: the kind of fix, and optionally, the relevant component(s). I find sometimes that can take up the majority of the title.

A forge could consume the git-notes and decorate a commit/pr accordingly. Heck, GitHub PRs already have a labeling system in place, just have to add some glue.

The author's example of a conventional commit is not correct anyway IMO, which is maybe why they think the "fix" part is redundant:

> fix: prevent foo from bar'ing

The whole idea of conventional commit is:

> fix: [problem]

so the correct conventional commit would be:

> fix: foo bar'ing

which is succinct and perfectly fine.

Previously: https://blog.julik.nl/2020/04/do-not-use-tickets-in-commit-t... with honorable mention of conventional commits. There is nothing conventional about them - it's ceremony that's wasting valuable characters that can have a better use.

The article is 100% on the mark.

Keep a Changelog[0] maintainer here, weirdly seeing this while deep into work on way overdue 2.0 "release"[1], which should be out very soon.

I've had to contend with Conventional Commits both in the OSS world and at work as it proliferated from what seemed to me like robotic adoption by folks who were even loosely associated with the Angular ecosystem (remember that?).

I've always had a stance with KAC that folks trying to automate changelog creation (prior to LLM rise, mind you) were focusing on the wrong thing. I still think there's a fundamental difference in focus between what you write in a git commit and what you present in a changelog.

I know there are fundamental philosophical differences for folks who were used to HISTORY vs. NEWS vs. CHANGELOG but with the growing adoption of KAC-like CHANGELOG.md files and Release Notes (often not synonymous) I think we're thankfully past the weird era were maintainers dumped raw git log ranges between two tags and called that a changelog. I'm sure some still do it. But that's what Conventional Commits tries to replicate.

What's really odd to me is that this assumes (broadly) that every single commit in a repository is relevant to the eventual version release changelog (or release notes). Even if you assume some CC types get filtered and deprioritized from generated changelogs by some tools, it's still a huge miss on what communicating about a release typically means: these change likely matter to you as a package dependent or direct user, while others were omitted for good reason.

I'm trying to articulate that much more clearly in KAC 2.0 because there's a fundamental paradigm shift when a robot can now analyze recent work (yours or theirs) and craft changelog entries that appropriately shift the audience perspective from "git message for me/us in the future to understand this change" to "changelog entry for you/them to know what this group of changes means".

[0]: https://keepachangelog.com

[1]: https://github.com/olivierlacan/keep-a-changelog/pull/600 if anyone's curious and wants to get involved

Yes. It’s just more bike shedding. Write helpful comments if you care about such things. Example: https://www.sqlite.org/src/timeline

I totally agree.

If one needs to put metadata in commits, usually better to just put it in a Git trailer.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers

`Co-authored-by: Alice` is a common one, but you can have anything in there.

The issue with all of these schemes is less about the format and more about the semantics itself. What are all the actions that can be done to a codebase and what is a controlled vocabulary that encapsulates those? Then it doesn’t matter what system you use.

I spent some time recently coming to the conclusion that I did not prefer CC, but wanting some reliable structure. In the end, I found I was coming up with convoluted schemes that were getting in the way of actually solving my real problems and just settled on the tried and true:

    “When applied this commit will...”

    - Add <functionality>

    - Update <existing>

    - Refactor <while keeping same boundary behavior>

    - Remove <some subsystem or functionality>

    - Cleanup <documentation or style>

I don’t consider this to be a complete taxonomy, but it does let me get on with my day and covers most things, especially when combined with thoughtful commit messages.

There's no benefit to any of this. Just write like human. It will be clear if it's a fix, or a refactor, or ?. Typically it isn't just one of those things.

Article is too opinionated IMO. I enforce CC on my projects because I don’t have the energy to police horrendous commit messages. It’s easy to enforce the CC format on the repo merge policy. I do it with the addition of a required issue ID as well.

If I only worked with seasoned devs, I wouldn’t use it, but that’s just the reality of my work. It also has a bonus of forcing AI agents to write in the same form as well instead of their random personal flavor. Precommit hooks stop everything before it gets in front of my eyes for review.

I have never once considered conventional commits to be about human understanding, but more about automation (release notes, changelogs, and workflows).

The commit description and the pull request are for humans.

As a reviewer, I love type first because it sets expectations for what I'm going to look at. Similar if I'm bisecting or doing other history operations.

I don't do automated changelogs or versioning but it also makes it faster for me to do so.

I really dislike focusing on issue ids. I only want to jump to another tool if I need more information, so put it in the footer for after I've read what is there, like a front page news article giving you the option to go to the back to read more. Worst case that I've seen is people that think the Issue ID is all you need.

I have never been involved in a project where people make good commits. Having a convention at least forces people to make thoughtful one-liners.

I'm quite fond of vimscript legend Tim Pope's guidance on writing commit messages.

https://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-mess...

Why not both? Scope is definitely important. But type is also important: - prioritization: bugfix > docs - visibility: are we spending more time on bug fixes or features?

Also, we let AI write the code, are we STILL writing commit messages by hand??

I think any notation is use case specific and should be adapted to beat serve its domain.

However, actually writing a good commit message is an art form few have mastered.

I wrote a small natural language linter to teach my teams meaningful technical writing: https://github.com/codingjoe/word-weasel

Commits should have no information in them. Teams should be aligned on the design of their software, and all the information about that software should be apparent from its source code.

I see more of these conventional commit-style comments recently and it feels like coming from Claude Code etc. It's a bit unsettling that not only training data but also random lines in the default system prompt affects this kind of software development norms in subtle and pervasive ways.

I have long despised Conventional Commits for pretty much these reasons. Yes, it’s structure, but it’s not useful structure. Of the five things it claims to enable, three are nonsense and the other two are actively bad.

And it’s ugly.

(But I suppose I am talking primarily about the first line part. The “BREAKING CHANGE” bit is potentially actually useful, though being incompatible with git-interpret-trailers despite leaning on git-interpret-trailers for other footers seems a bit crazy.)

There’s a much less awkward way to keep a change log:

Keep a change log.

As a solo developer, I rarely struggle to remember what changed yesterday. I often struggle to remember why I made a decision six months ago.

Conventional commits are most valuable to me as historical context rather than as a release-management tool.

The larger the project becomes, the more useful that context gets.

I think some structure in commit messages is helpful, but not to the point where it gets in the way of effectively reflecting what the commit contains, why it was done, and any comments for future reference, e.g. potential regressions.

This entire essay is just about how it should be "<scope> <optional type>" instead of "<type> <optional scope>"?

Definitely agree that generating change logs from commits leads to confusing change logs for people that expect to see what changed between versions. A big long list of commits is too granular. A curated and summarized list of changes is much more in-line with what most people expect when reading a change log.

Related. Others?

ReleaseJet – Release notes from issue labels, no Conventional Commits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47847605 - April 2026 (1 comment)

Why Use Conventional Commits? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46940152 - Feb 2026 (1 comment)

Conventional Commits Considered Harmful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019218 - Nov 2025 (1 comment)

Conventional Commits Considered Harmful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45420887 - Sept 2025 (1 comment)

Conventional Commits makes me sad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44482546 - July 2025 (2 comments)

A specification for adding human/machine readable meaning to commit messages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740669 - June 2024 (2 comments)

A specification for adding human and machine readable meaning to commit messages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34660646 - Feb 2023 (48 comments)

Ask HN: Are you still using conventional commits? If not why not? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33525754 - Nov 2022 (4 comments)

Conventional Commits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30950377 - April 2022 (1 comment)

I Hate Conventional Commits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29924976 - Jan 2022 (1 comment)

Conventional Commits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208815 - Aug 2020 (23 comments)

Conventional Commits: A specification for structured commit messages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21125669 - Oct 2019 (95 comments)

So much commit hygiene and fuss appears git induced. Use something other than git and the problems disappear.

Couldn't agree more with this. The commit type tells me almost nothing and just wastes my time skipping over it. Scopes are way more useful.

And then you have me, using gitmoji

This seems very nitpicky

In other words a perfect topic for HN

Asides from the well made points here ('scope is more important than type' etc).

> something like fix, feat, chore, docs, or refactor

'Docs' are also part of the program, they need fixes too, and features need docs. If the docs don't match the features because they're not being updated when the code is, the docs are a lie and waste other developers time.

Also if you were writing a standard: why would you randomly abbreviate 'feature' but not 'refactor'? That sounds like a nitpick but standards require great thought, this is a bit of a smell that there hasn't been much thought into designing 'conventional commits'.

Finally: the name 'Conventional commits' is a land grab (reminds me of when someone made a JS Standard and called it 'StandardJS', ignoring every existing popular standard). From the article, the *actual* convention is 'scope: work"

- Linux

  subsystem: description

- FreeBSD

  prefix: description

- Git

  area: description

- Go

  package: description

- nixpkgs

  pkg-name: description

The proposal, https://scopedcommits.com/, is not that different.

My gripe about conventional commits is the redundancy: fix(ci): fix the foobar

Mine is “ticket id - Imperative phrase”. Then I write a “why” description of the changes if needs be. As for personal project, I quite like the scoped commits style.

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I don't care much what it says as in "fix", "chore" etc, but for me the main benefit is breaking changes indicated with "<type>!", something like "feat!: ... ".

This makes neovim plugin manager highlight the change differently which brings attention to it when you update stuff.

So please do use it instead of complaining!

I do like the suggestion of

scope!: ...

if it will be treated the same way with breaking changes reactions.

terrible suggestion, people are awful at writing commit messages and the type is really helpful when you're reviewing history and want to know things at a glance

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I really dont care about commit messages. Just create strict rules for branches that contains issue nr + description, and squash all commits on merging the PR.