Abolish Git Commit Messages

In October 2025, Grokipedia was launched as an AI-powered alternative to human-written encyclopaedias, Wikipedia in particular. The presumed architect of the Grokipedia project, Elon Musk, had previously accused Wikipedia of having a left-wing bias and retweeted a post^† that read:

Wikipedia is completely ideologically captured. Deserves $0 in donations until they re-balance.

I haven't found an explanation from Musk for why an AI-powered encyclopaedia would be free of bias. Perhaps the belief is rooted in the picture science fiction paints for us: if you build a machine with sufficient computing power and feed it enough data, it will converge on truth. Machines are logical and devoid of emotion, or so the trope goes. Anyone who uses AI agents heavily in the non-fiction world will attest that they are not neutral arbiters. They parrot the biases of their sources. Worse, they introduce new errors by misinterpreting sources, and are known to confabulate (hallucinate) information when available sources run dry.

Still, AI agents are a breakthrough for information retrieval. Not because they are unbiased, but because they are interactive. Gemini and Claude can answer a user's question directly by cross-referencing dozens of sources, distilling the exact information the user seeks in seconds. Grokipedia lacks the convenience of interactivity, and so combines the downsides of Grok and Wikipedia. It is – by design – a static repository of inaccurate information anyone with access to an AI agent could generate on the fly.

Many of my colleagues nowadays have an AI agent interact with Git on their behalf. A generation of software engineers is emerging who never have to learn the Git CLI at all, and I envy them. (Though perhaps they still should; that's a conversation for another day.) My gripe is with the commit messages these agents produce: unless instructed otherwise, they tend to summarise the diff in exhausting detail.

Anyone on the team can generate that summary by piping git diff dae86e^! into an AI agent. They can request it in Spanish, in layman's terms, and/or as a sonnet. What I hope to find in a commit message instead is context, intent, reasoning – clues that did not make it into the tree. If we humans and our AI agents are not going to include those, I suggest we revert to our old habit of stringing together barely a full sentence or even typing "fix" or "stuff" just to get Git to take the commit. "stuff" tells you nothing, but it is accurate. And if a commit message is going to tell nothing, I would rather it does so in five characters than two paragraphs.