I don't think commit messages are useless at all. It's not about "showing your work" like the author says. It's about summarising the changes in a way that you can quickly read and understand. People forget that commit messages don't have to be just one line, you can write full paragraphs explaining the motivation and thinking behind the change. Many projects enforce detailed commit messages like this because they can be invaluable years down the road when everybody involved is gone.

>Git recently added an --allow-empty-message flag, but really this is backwards. Commit messages should be empty by default. If you want to name your save points, you should have to do so explicitly. Actually, why doesn’t it just constantly autosave your work, like editing text anywhere else (Google Docs, Notion, etc.)?

If I were to clone a repo and find empty commit messages I would probably flip a table and refuse to work on it. This is a terrible idea. How would you use git bisect without commit messages?

The tool should not allow people to do things just because it feels easier.

>We all write them, and they cost the collective engineers of the world countless hours writing ridiculous messages like, “changed something”, “did work”, or the super descriptive, “stuff”.

These kinds of commit messages are typically an indicator of a broken process where somebody needs to commit to see something happen, like a deployment or build process, and aren't able to assert that stuff works locally.

I think the problem comes down to many people just using git as a glorified storage drive for code and not really understanding how to get the most out of the tool.