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I figure that so few people read commit messages that in most part of time this is kind of useless. Specially in an early stage of a project. Things will change as faster as I can type a message such as this.

Code is simple. Humans overthink. I would prefer a commit message such as: "Fix invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII when running bundle exec rspec." than a dev that keep stucked trying to write a cool message and never fix the issue.

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> few people read commit messages

That very much varies. In a project where 90% of commits are “fix”, “foo”, “commit”, etc. then yes. Nobody will ever read that (or do pretty much anything else useful with a VCS).

On the other hand, when every commit message is on the level, the yes, people do read them. Actually, first step when investigating any problem or trying to understand some code is to look at the commit log.

See e.g. Linux kernel or some of the Google-related open source projects (chromium, webrtc, etc.) for examples of good, long-form commit messages.

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